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OF 

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In One Volume. 

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EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. 



THE 



LITERARY CHARACTER; 



HISTORY OF MEN OF GENIUS, 



DRAWN FROM THEIR OWN FEELINGS AND CONFESSIONS. 



BY I. DISRAELI, D.C.L., F.S.A., 

ETC. ETC. 



FIFTH EDITION, REVISED. 



LONDON : 
EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. 



MDCCCXXXIX. 



c,o 






LONDON : 

BRAPBURV AND EVANS, PRINTERS, 

WHITEKRIARS. 



Transfer 
Kfflgfneers School Uby. 
June 29,3 93! 



ROBERT SOUTHEY, LL.D. 

&c. &c. &c. 



In dedicating this Work to one of the most eminent 
literary characters of the age, I am experiencing a peculiar 
gratification, in which few, perhaps none, of my contempo- 
raries can participate; for I am addressing him, whose 
earliest effusions attracted my regard, near half a century 
past ; and during that awful interval of time, for fifty years 
is a trial of life of whatever may be good hi us, you have 
multiplied your talents, and have never lost a virtue. 

When I turn from the uninterrupted studies of your 

"nmestic solitude to our metropolitan authors, the contrast, 

hot encouraging, is at least extraordinary. You are not 

laware that the revolutions of Society have operated on 

o. r literature, and that new classes of readers have called 



IV DEDICATION. 

forth new classes of writers. The causes, and the conse- 
quences, of the present state of this fugitive literature, 
might form an inquiry which would include some of the 
important topics which concern the Public Mind, — hut an 
inquiry which might be invidious, shall not disturb a page 
consecrated to the record of excellence. They who draw 
their inspiration from the hour must not, however, complain 
if with that hour they pass away. 

I. DISRAELI. 

March, 1839. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Of literary characters, and of the lovers of literature and art . 1 

CHAPTER II. 

Of the adversaries of literary men among themselves. — Matter-of- 
fact-men, and men of wit. — The political economists. — Of those 
"who abandon their studies. — Men in office. — The arbiters of 
public opinion. — Those who treat the pursuits of literature 
with levity . . . . . . . .5 

CHAPTER III. 

Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius. — Their habits 
and pursuits analogous. — The nature of their genius is similar 
in their distinct works. — Shown by their parallel seras, and by 
a common end pursued by both . . . . . .15 

CHAPTER IV. 

Of natural genius. — Minds constitutionally different cannot have 
an equal aptitude. — Genius not the result of habit and educa- 
tion. — Originates in peculiar qualities of the mind. — The pre- 
disposition of genius — A substitution for the white paper of 

Locke • . . . .20 

b 



V CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER V. 

Youth of genius. — Its first impulses may be illustrated by its 
subsequent actions. — Parents have another association of the 
man of genius than we. — Of genius, its first habits. — Its me- 
lancholy. — Its reveries. — Its love of solitude. — Its disposition 
to repose. — Of a youth distinguished by his equals. — Feebleness 
of its first attempts. — Of genius not discoverable even in man- 
hood. — The education of the youth may not be that of his 
genius. — An unsettled impulse, querulous till it finds its true 
occupation. — With .some, curiosity as intense a faculty as in- 
vention. — What the youth t first applies to is commonly his 
delight afterwards. — Facts of the decisive character of genius . 31 

CHAPTER VI. 

The first studies. — The self-educated are marked by stubborn 
peculiarities. — Their errors. — Their improvement from the 
neglect or contempt they incur. — The history of self-education 
in Moses Mendelsohn. — Friends usually prejudicial in the 

youth of genius A remarkable interview between Petrarch 

in his first studies, and his literary adviser. — Exhortation . GO 

CHAPTER VII. 

Of the irritability of genius. — Genius in society often in a state 

of suffering Equality of temper more prevalent among men 

of letters. — Of the occupation of making a great name. — 
Anxieties of the most successful. — Of the inventors. — Writers 
of learning. — Writers of taste. — Artists . . . .37 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Tbe spirit of literature and the spirit of society. — The inventors. 
— Society offers seduction and not reward to. men of genius. — 
The notions of persons of fashion of men of genius. — The 
habitudes of the man of genius distinct from those of the man 
of society. — Study, meditation, and enthusiasm, the progress 
of genius. — The disagreement between the men of the world 
and the literary character . . . . . . . 1 1 ■"> 



CONTENTS. Vll 

PAGE 

CHAPTER IX. 

Conversations of men of genius. — Their deficient agreeableness 
may result from qualities -which conduce to their greatness. — 

Slow-minded men not the dullest The conversationists not 

the ablest writers. — Their true excellence in conversation con- 
sists of associations with their pursuits . . . .130 

CHAPTER X. 

Literary solitude. — Its necessity. — Its pleasures. — Of visitors by 
profession. — Its inconveniences 145 

CHAPTER XI. 

The meditations of genius. — A -work on the art of meditation not 
yet produced. — Predisposing the mind. — Imagination awakens 
imagination. — Generating feelings by music. — Slight habits. 
— .Darkness and silence, by suspending the exercise of our 
senses, increase the vivacity of our conceptions. — The arts of 
memory. — Memory the foundation of genius. — Inventions by 
several to preserve their own moral and literary character. — 
And to assist their studies. — The meditations of genius depend 
on habit. — Of the night-time. — A day of meditation should 
precede a day of composition. — Works of magnitude from 
slight conceptions. — Of thoughts never written. — The art of 
meditation exercised at all hours and places. — Continuity of 
attention the source of philosophical discoveries. — Stillness of 
meditation the first state of existence in genius . . .154 

CHAPTER XII. 

The enthusiasm of genius. — A state of mind resembling awaking 
dream distinct from reverie. — The ideal presence distinguished 

from the real presence The senses are really affected in the 

ideal world, proved by a variety of instances. — Of the rapture 
or sensation of deep study in art, science, and literature. — Of 
perturbed feelings, in delirium. — In extreme endurance of at- 
tention. — And in visionary illusions. — Enthusiasts in literature 
and art — of their self-immolations . . . . .184 

62 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Of the Jealousy of Genius — Jealousy often proportioned to the 
degree of genius. — A perpetual fever among Authors and 
Artists. — Instances of its incredible excess, among brothers 
and benefactors. — Of a peculiar species, where the fever con- 
sumes the sufferer, without its malignancy .... 210 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Want of mutual esteem, among men of genius, often originates in 
a deficiency of analogous ideas. — It is not always envy or jea- 
lousy which induces men of genius to undervalue each other . 217 

CHAPTER XV. 

Self-praise of genius. — The love of praise instinctive in the na- 
ture of genius A high opinion of themselves necessary for 

their great designs. — The Ancients openly claimed their owu 
praise. — And several Moderns. — An author knows more of 
his merits than his readers. — And less of his defects. — Authors 
versatile in their admiration and their malignity . . .221 

CHAPTER XVI. 

The domestic life of genius. — Defects of great compositions at- 
tributed to domestic infelicities. — The home of the literary 
character should be the abode of repose and silence. — Of the 
Father. — Of the Mother. — Of family genius. — Men of ge- 
nius not more respected than other men in their domestic circle. 

The cultivators of science and art do not meet on equal 

terms with others, in domestic life. — Their neglect of those 
around them. — Often accused of imaginary crimes . . 238 

CHAPTER XVII. 
The poverty of literary men. — Poverty, a relative quality. — Of 
the poverty of literary men in what degree desirable. — Extreme 
poverty. — Task-work. — Of gratuitous works. — A project to 
provide against the worst state of poverty among literary men . 250 






CONTENTS. IX 

PAGE 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

The matrimonial state of literature. — Matrimony said not to be 
well suited to the domestic life of genius. — Celibacy a concealed 
cause of the early querulousness of men of genius. — Of unhappy 
unions. — Not absolutely necessary that the "wife should be a 
literary woman. — Of the docility and susceptibility of the higher 
female character. — A picture of a literary wife . . . 272 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Literary friendships. — In early life. — Different from those of men 
of the world. — They suffer in unrestrained communication of 
their ideas, and bear reprimands and exhortations. — Unity of 
feelings. — A sympathy not of manners but of feelings. — Admit 
of dissimilar characters. — Their peculiar glory. — Their sorrow . 288 



CHAPTER XX. 

The literary and the personal character. The personal dispositions 
of an author may be the reverse of those which appear in his 

writings. Erroneous conceptions of the character of distant 

authors. — Paradoxical appearances in the history of genius. — 
Why the character of the man may be opposite to that of his 
writings 



300 



ICHAPTER XXI. 

The man of letters. — Occupies an intermediate station between 
authors and readers. — His solitude described. — Often the father 
of genius. — Atticus, a man of letters of antiquity. — The per- 
fect character of a modern man of letters exhibited in Peiresc. 
— Their utility to authors and artists 313 

CHAPTER XXII. 

Literary old age still learning.— Influence of late studies in life. 
— Occupations in advanced age of the literary character. — Of 
literary men who have died at their studies .... 330 



X CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

Universality of genius.— Limited notion of genius entertained by 
the ancients — Opposite faculties act with diminished force. — 
Men of genius excel only in a single art .... 339 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

Literature an avenue to glory.— An intellectual nobility not chi- 
merical, but created by public opinion. — Literary honours of 
various nations. — Local associations with the memory of the 
man of genius 346 

CHAPTER XXV. 

Influence of authors on society and of society on authors. — Na- 
tional tastes a source of literary prejudices. — True genius always 
the organ of its nation. — Master-writers preserve the distinct 
national character. — Genius the organ of the state of the age. — 

Causes of its suppression in a people Often invented, but 

neglected. — The natural gradations of genius. — Men of genius 
produce their usefulness in privacy. — The public mind is now 
the creation of the public writer. — Politicians affect to deny 
this principle. — Authors stand between the governors and the 
governed. — A view of the solitary author in his study. — They 
create an epoch in history — Influence of popular authors. — The 
immortality of thought. — The family of genius illustrated by 
their genealogy 361 



PREFACE. 

For the fifth time I revise a subject which has occu- 
pied my inquiries from early life, with feelings still 
delightful, and an enthusiasm not wholly diminished. 

Had not the principle upon which this work is con- 
structed occurred to me in my youth, the materials 
which illustrate the literary character could never have 
been brought together. It was early in life that I con- 
ceived the idea of pursuing the history of genius by the 
similar events which had occurred to men of genius. 
Searching into literary history for the literary character, 
formed a course of experimental philosophy in which 
every new essay verified a former trial, and confirmed a 
former truth. By the great philosophical principle of 
induction, inferences were deduced and results esta- 
blished, which, however vague and doubtful in specu- 
lation, are irresistible when the appeal is made to facts 
as they relate to others, and to feelings which must be 
decided on as they are passing in our own breast. 



Xll PREFACE. 

It is not to be inferred from what I have here stated, 
that I conceive that any single man of genius will 
resemble every man of genius ; for not only man differs 
from man, but varies from himself in the different stages 
of human life. All that I assert is, that every man of 
genius will discover, sooner or later, that he belongs to 
the brotherhood of his class, and that he cannot escape 
from certain habits, and feelings, and disorders, which 
arise from the same temperament and sympathies, and 
are the necessary consequence of occupying the same 
position, and passing through the same moral existence. 
Whenever ?e compare men of genius with each other, 
the history of those who are no more, will serve as a 
perpetual commentary on our contemporaries. There 
are, indeed, secret feelings which their prudence con- 
ceals, or their fears obscure, or their modesty shrinks 
from, or their pride rejects ; but I have sometimes ima- 
gined that I have held the clue as they have lost them- 
selves in their own labyrinth. I know that many, and 
some of great celebrity, have sympathised with the 
feelings which inspired these volumes; nor, while I 
have elucidated the idiosyncrasy of genius, have I less 
studied the habits and characteristics of the lovers of 
literature. 

It has been considered that the subject of this work 
might have been treated with more depth of metaphy- 
sical disquisition, and there has since appeared an 



PREFACE. Xlll 

attempt to combine with this investigation the medical 
science. A work, however, should be judged by its 
design and its execution, and not by any preconceived 
notion of what it ought to be according to the critic, 
rather than the author. The nature of this work is 
dramatic rather than metaphysical. It offers a narra- 
tion or a description ; a conversation or a monologue ; 
an incident or a scene. 

Perhaps I have sometimes too warmly apologised for 
the infirmities of men of genius. From others we may 
hourly learn to treat with levity the man of genius 
because he is only such. Perhaps also I ma?f have been 
too fond of the subject, which has been for me an old 
and a favourite one — I may have exalted the literary 
character, beyond the scale by which society is willing 
to fix it. Yet what is this Society, so omnipotent, so 
all-judicial ? The society of to-day was not the society 
of yesterday. Its feelings, its thoughts, its manners, 
its rights, its wishes, and its wants, are different and 
are changed : alike changed or alike created by those 
very literary characters whom it rarely comprehends 
and often would despise. Let us no longer look upon 
this retired and peculiar class as useless members of our 
busy race. There are mental as well as material 
labourers. The first are not less necessary ; and as 
they are much rarer, so are they more precious. These 
are they whose " published labours" have benefited 



XIV PREFACE. 

mankind — these are they whose thoughts can alone 
rear that beautiful fabric of social life, which it is the 
object of all good men to elevate or to support. To 
discover truth and to maintain it, — to develop the 
powers, to regulate the passions, to ascertain the privi- 
leges of man, — such have ever been and such ever ought 
to be, the labours of Authors ! Whatever we enjoy 
of political and private happiness, our most necessary 
knowledge as well as our most refined pleasures, are 
alike owing to this class of men, and of these some for 
glory, and often from benevolence, have shut themselves 
out from the very beings whom they love, and for whom 
they labour. 

Upwards of forty years have elapsed since, composed 
in a distant county, and printed at a provincial press, I 
published " An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the 
Literary Character." To my own habitual and inhe- 
rent defects were superadded those of my youth. The 
crude production was however not ill received, for the 
edition disappeared, and the subject was found more 
interesting than the writer. 

During a long interval of twenty years, this little 
work was often recalled to my recollection by several, 
and by some who have since obtained celebrity. They 
imagined that their attachment to literary pursuits had 
been strengthened even by so weak an effort. An ex- 
traordinary circumstance concurred with these opinions. 






PREFACE. XV 

A copy accidentally fell into my hands which had for- 
merly belonged to the great poetical genius of our times, 
and the singular fact that it had been more than once 
read by him, and twice in two subsequent years at 
Athens, in 1810 and 1811, instantly convinced me that 
the volume deserved my renewed attention. 

It was with these feelings that I was again strongly 
attracted to a subject from which, indeed, during the 
course of a studious life, it had never been long diverted. 
The consequence of my labours, was the publication, in 
1818, of an octavo volume, under the title of " The 
Literary Character, illustrated by the History of Men 
of Genius, drawn from their own feelings and con- 
fessions." 

In the Preface to this Edition, in mentioning the 
fact respecting Lord Byron, which had been the im- 
mediate cause of its publication, I added these words : 
" I tell this fact assuredly not from any little vanity 
which it may appear to betray ; — for the truth is, were 
I not as liberal and as candid in respect to my own 
productions, as I hope I am to others, I could not have 
been gratified by the present circumstance; for the 
marginal notes of the noble author convey no flattery ; 
— but amidst their pungency, and sometimes their 
truth, the circumstance that a man of genius could 
reperuse this slight effusion at two different periods of 



XVI PREFACE. 

his life, was a sufficient authority, at least for an author, 
to return it once more to the anvil." 

Some time after the publication of this Edition of 
" The Literary Character," which was in fact a new 
work, I was shown, through the kindness of an English 
gentleman lately returned from Italy, a copy of it, 
which had been given to him by Lord Byron, and 
which again contained marginal notes by the noble 
author. These were peculiarly interesting, and were 
chiefly occasioned by observations on his character, 
which appeared in the work. 

In 1822 I published a new edition of this work, 
greatly enlarged, and in two volumes. I took this 
opportunity of inserting the Manuscript Notes of Lord 
Byron, with the exception of one, which, however cha- 
racteristic of the amiable feelings of the noble poet, and 
however gratifying to my own, I had no wish to 
obtrude on the notice of the public *. 

* As everything connected with the reading of a mind like Lord 
Byron's is interesting to the philosophical inquirer, this note may 
now he preserved. On that passage of the Preface of the second 
Edition which I have already quoted, his Lordship was thus pleased to 
write : 

" I was wrong, hut I was young and petulant, and probably wrote 
down any thing, little thinking that those observations would be betrayed 
to the author, whose abilities I have always respected, and whose works 
in general I have read oftener than perhaps those of any English author 
whatever, except such as treat of Turkey." 



PREFACE. XV11 

Soon after the publication of this third Edition, I 
received the following letter from his Lordship : — 

" Montenero, Villa Dupuy, near 
Leghorn, June 10, 1822. 

%t Dear Sir, — 

" If you will permit me to call you so, — I 
had some time ago taken up my pen at Pisa, to thank 
you for the present of your new edition of the ' Lite- 
rary Character,' which has often been to me a con- 
solation, and always a pleasure. I was interrupted, 
however, partly by business, and partly by vexation of 
different kinds, — for I have not very long ago lost a 
child by a fever, and I have had a good deal of petty 
trouble with the laws of this lawless country, on account 
of the prosecution of a servant for an attack upon a 
cowardly scoundrel of a dragoon, who drew his sword 
upon some unarmed Englishmen, and whom I had 
done the honour to mistake for an officer, and to treat 
like a gentleman. He turned out to be neither, — like 
many other with medals, and in uniform ; but he paid 
for his brutality with a severe and dangerous wound, 
inflicted by nobody knows whom, for, of three sus- 
pected, and two arrested, they have been able to iden- 
tify neither ; which is strange, since he was wounded 
in the presence of thousands, in a public street, during 
a feast-day and full promenade. — But to return to 
things more analogous to the 'Literary Character:' 



XV111 PREFACE. 

I wish to say, that had I known that the book was to 
fall into your hands, or that the MS. notes you have 
thought worthy of publication, would have attracted 
your attention, I would have made them more copious, 
and perhaps not so careless. 

" I really cannot know whether I am, or am not, 
the genius you are pleased to call me, — but I am very 
willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is 
a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it 
endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, 
which it never can be, till the Posterity, whose deci- 
sions are merely dreams to ourselves, have sanctioned 
or denied it, while it can touch us no further. 

" Mr. Murray is in possession of a MS. memoir of 
mine (not to be published till I am in my grave), 
which, strange as it may seem, I never read over since 
it was written, and have no desire to read over again. 
In it, I have told what, as far as I know, is the truth 
— not the whole truth — for if I had done so, I must 
have involved much private, and some dissipated 
history ; but, nevertheless, nothing but truth, as far as 
regard for others permitted it to appear. 

" I do not kuow whether you have seen those 
MSS. ; but, as you are curious in such things as relate 
to the human mind, I should feel gratified if you had. 
I also sent him (Murray), a few days since, a Com- 
mon-place Book, by my friend Lord Clare, containing 



PREFACE. XIX 



a few tilings, which may perhaps aid his publication in 
case of his surviving me. If there are any questions 
which you would like to ask me, as connected with 
your philosophy' of the literary mind (if mine be a 
literary mind), I will answer them fairly, or give a 
reason for not, good — bad — or indifferent. At present, 
I am paying the penalty of having helped to spoil the 
public taste ; for, as long as I wrote in the false 
exaggerated style of youth and the times in which we 
live, they applauded me to the very echo ; and within 
these few years, when I have endeavoured at better 
things, and written what I suspect to have the prin- 
ciple of duration in it : the Church, the Chancellor, 
and all men, even to my grand patron, Francis Jeffrey, 
Esq., of the Edinburgh Review, have risen up against 
me, and my later publications. Such is Truth ! men 
dare not look her in the face, except by degrees ; they 
mistake her for a Gorgon, instead of knowing her to 
be Minerva. I do not mean to apply this mytho- 
logical simile to my own endeavours, but I have only 
to turn over a few pages of your volumes, to find 
innumerable and far more illustrious instances. It is 
lucky that I am of a temper not to be easily turned aside, 
though by no means difficult to irritate. But I am 
making a dissertation, instead of writing a letter. I 
write to you from the Yilla Dujmy, near Leghorn, 
with the islands of Elba and Corsica visible from my 



XX PREFACE. 

balcony, and my old friend the Mediterranean rolling 
blue at my feet. As long as I retain my feeling and 
my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue 
my other passions, and resist or endure those of others. 

" I have the honour to be, truly, your obliged 
and faithful servant, 

" Noel Byron. 
" To I. D'Israeli, Esq." 

The ill-starred expedition to Greece followed this 

Letter. 



This work, conceived in youth, executed by the 
research of manhood, and associated with the noblest 
feelings of our nature, is an humble but fervent tribute, 
offered to the memory of those Master Spirits from 
w T hose labours, as Burke eloquently describes, " their 
country receives permanent service. Those who know 
how to make the silence of their closets more beneficial 
to the world than all the noise and bustle of courts, 
senates, and camps." 






LITERARY CHARACTER. 



CHAPTER I. 

Of Literary Characters, and of the Lovers of Literature and Art. 

Diffused over enlightened Europe, an order of men 
has arisen, who, uninfluenced by the interests or the 
passions which give an impulse to the other classes of 
society, are connected by the secret links of congenial 
pursuits, and, insensibly to themselves, are combining 
in the same common labours, and participating in the 
same divided glory. In the metropolitan cities of 
Europe the same authors are now read, and the same 
opinions become established : the Englishman is fami- 
liar with Machiavel and Montesquieu ; the Italian and 
the Frenchman with Bacon and Locke ; and the same 
smiles and tears are awakened on the banks of the 
Thames, of the Seine, or of the Guadalquivir, by Shake- 
speare, Moliere, and Cervantes. 

Contemporains de tous les hommes, 
Et citoyens de tous les lieux. 

A khan of Tartary admired the wit of Moliere, and 
discovered the Tartuffe in the Crimea ; and had this 



2 THE LITERARY CHARACTER. 

ingenious sovereign survived the translation which he 
ordered, the immortal labour of the comic satirist of 
France might have laid the foundations of good taste 
even among the Turks and the Tartars. We see the 
Italian Pignotti referring to the opinion of an English 
critic, Lord Bolingbroke, for decisive authority on the 
peculiar characteristics of the historian Gmcciardini : 
t\e German Schlegel writes on our Shakespeare like a 
patriot ; and while the Italians admire the noble scenes 
which our Flaxman has drawn from their great Poet, 
they have rejected the feeble attempts of their native 
artists. Such is the wide and the perpetual influence 
of this living intercourse of literary minds. 

Scarcely have two centuries elapsed since the litera- 
ture of every nation was limited to its father-land, and 
men of genius long could only hope for the spread of their 
fame in the single language of ancient Rome; which 
for them had ceased to be natural, and could never be 
popular. It was in the intercourse of the wealth, the 
Lwer, and the novel arts of the nations of Europe, 
that they learnt each other's languages ; and they dis- 
covered, that however their manners varied as they 
arose from their different customs, they participated in 
the same intellectual faculties, suffered from the same 
wants, and were alive to the same pleasures ; they per- 
ceived that there were no conventional fashions, nor 
national distinctions, in abstract truths and fundamental 
knowledge. A new spirit seems to bring them nearer 
to each other ; and as if literary Europe were intent to 
form but one people out of the populace of mankind 
they offer their reciprocal labours ; they pledge to each 



THE LITERARY CHARACTER. 3 

other the same opinions; and that knowledge which, like 
a small river, takes its source from one spot, at length 
mingles with the ocean-stream common to them all. 

But those who stand connected with this literary 
community are not always sensible of the kindred 
alliance ; even a genius of the first order has not always 
been aware that he is the founder of a society, and that 
there will ever be a brotherhood where there is a father- 
genius. 

These literary characters are partially, and with a 
melancholy colouring, exhibited by Johnson. " To 
talk in private, to think in solitude, to inquire or to 
answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar. He 
wanders about the world without pomp or terror ; and 
is neither known nor valued but by men like himself." 
Thus thought this great writer during those sad proba- 
tionary years of genius, when 

" Slow rises worth, by poverty depress' d ;" 

not yet conscious that he himself was devoting his days 
to cast the minds of his contemporaries and of the suc- 
ceeding age in the mighty mould of his own ; for John- 
son was of that order of men whose individual genius 
becomes that of a people. A prouder conception rose 
in the majestic mind of Milton, of " that lasting fame 
and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have 
consented shall be the reward of those whose published 
labours advance the good of mankind." 

The literary character is a denomination which, 

however vague, defines the pursuits of the individual, 

and separates him from other professions, although it 

frequently occurs that he is himself a member of one. 

b 2 



4 LOVERS OF LITERATURE AND ART. 

Professional characters are modified by the change of 
manners, and are usually national ; while the literary 
character, from the objects in which it concerns itsell, 
retains a more permanent, and necessarily a more 
independent nature. 

Formed by the same habits, and influenced by the 
same motives, notwithstanding the contrast of talents 
and tempers, and the remoteness of times and places, 
the literary character has ever preserved among its 
followers the most striking family-resemblance. The 
passion for study, the delight in books, the desire of 
solitude and celebrity, the obstructions of human Me, 
the character of their pursuits, the uniformity of their 
habits, the triumphs and the disappointments of literary 
glory, were as truly described by Cicero and the 
youncrer Pliny as by Petrarch and Erasmus, and as 
they have been by Hume and Gibbon. And this simi- 
larity too may equally be remarked with respect to 
that noble passion of the lovers of literature and of art 
for collecting together their mingled treasures ; a thirst 
which was as insatiable in Atticus and Peiresc as in 
our Cracherode and Townley. We trace the feelings 
of our literary contemporaries in all ages, and among 
every people who have ranked with nations far advanced 
in civilization ; for among these may be equally observed 
both the great artificers of knowledge, and those who 
preserve unbroken the vast chain of human acquisitions. 
The one have stamped the images of their minds on 
their works, and the others have preserved the circula- 
tion of this intellectual coinage, this 

; Gold of the dead, 

Which Time does still disperse, hut not devour. 



MATTER-OF-FACT MEN. 



CHAPTER II. 

Of the Adversaries of Literary Men among themselves. — Matter-of- 
fact Men, and Men of Wit. — The Political Economists. — Of those 

who abandon their studies Men in office. — The arbiters of public 

opinion. — Those who treat the pursuits of literature with levity. 

The pursuits of literature have been openly or insi- 
diously lowered by those literary men who, from motives 
not always difficult to penetrate, are eager to confound 
the ranks in the republic of letters, maliciously con- 
ferring the honours of authorship on that " Ten Thou- 
sand" whose recent list is not so much a muster-roll of 
heroes, as a table of population.* 

Matter-of-fact men, or men of knowledge, and men 
of wit and taste, were long inimical to each other's 
pursuits. t The Royal Society in its origin could 

* We have a Dictionary of "Ten Thousand living Authors" of 
our own nation. The alphabet is fatal by its juxta-positions. In 
France, before the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand 
writers. When David would have his people numbered, Joab asked, 
"why doth my lord delight in this?" In political economy, the 
population returns may be useful, provided they be correct ; but in the 
literary republic, its numerical force diminishes the strength of the 
empire. " There you are numbered, we had rather you were weighed." 
Put aside the puling infants of literature, of whom such a mortality 
occurs in its nurseries ; such as the writers of the single sermon, the 
single law-tract, the single medical dissertation, &c. ; all writers whose 
subject is single, without being singular ; count for nothing the ineffi- 
cient mob of mediocrists ; and strike out our literary charlatans ; and 
then our alphabet of men of genius will not consist, as it now does, of 
the four-and-twenty letters. 

T The cause is developed in the chapter on Want of mutual 
Esteem. 



6 POLITICAL ECONOMISTS UNDERVALUE 

hardly support itself against the ludicrous attacks of 
literary men,* and the Antiquarian Society has afforded 
them amusement. Such partial views have ceased to 
contract the understanding. Science yields a new 
substance to literature; Literature combines new 
associations for the votaries of knowledge. There is no 
subject in nature, and in the history of man, which will 
not associate with our feelings and our curiosity, when- 
ever genius extends its awakening hand. The anti- 
quary, the naturalist, the architect, the chemist, and 
even writers on medical topics, have in our days 
asserted their claims, and discovered their long-inter- 
rupted relationship with the great family of genius and 
literature. 

A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphy- 
sicians of political economy, have struck at the essential 
existence of the productions of genius in literature and 
art; for, appreciating them by their own standard, they 
have miserably degraded the professors. Absorbed in 

* See Butler, in his "Elephant in the Moon." South, in his 
oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter sar- 
casm on the naturalists, — " Mirantur nihil nisi pulices ; pediculos- 
et se ipsos ,♦" — nothing they admire hut fleas, lice, and themselves! 
The illustrious Sloane endured a long persecution from the bantering 
humour of Dr. King. One of the most amusing declaimers against 
what he calls les Sciences des faux Sgavans is Father Malebranche 
he is far more severe than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded 
Rousseau, so famous for his invective against the sciences. Tho 
seventh chapter of his fourth book is an inimitable satire. "The 
principal excuse," says he, "which engages men in false studies, is, 
that they have attached the idea of learned where they should not." 
Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient poetry, and natural his- 
tory, are all mowed down by his metaphysical scythe. When we 
become acquainted with the idea Father Malebranche attaches to the 
term learned, we understand him — and we smile. 



LITERARY PURSUITS. 7 

the contemplation of material objects, and rejecting 
whatever does not enter into their own restricted 
notion of " utility," these cold arithmetical seers, with 
nothing but millions in their imagination, and whose 
choicest works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued 
the intellectual tasks of the library and the studio by 
" the demand and the supply." They have sunk these 
pursuits into the class of what they term " unproductive 
labour ;" and by another result of their line and level 
system, men of letters, with some other important cha- 
racters, are forced down into the class "of buffoons, 
singers, opera-dancers, &c." In a system of political 
economy it has been discovered, that " that unpros- 
perous race of men, called men of letter ■*, must 
necessarily occupy their present forlorn state in society, 
much as formerly, when a scholar and a beggar seem to 
have been terms very nearly synonymous."* In their 
commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing view of 
human nature, addressing society by its most pressing- 
wants and its coarsest feelings, these theorists limit the 
moral and physical existence of man by speculative 
tables of population, planing and levelling society 
down in their carpentry of human nature. They would 
yoke and harness the loftier spirits to one common and 
vulgar destination. Man is considered only as he 
wheels on the wharf, or as he spins in the factory ; but 
man, as a recluse being of meditation, or impelled to 
action by more generous passions, has been struck out 
of the system of our political economists. It is how- 

* Wealth of Nations, i. 182. 



8 LITERARY OPPONENTS AMONG 

ever only among their " unproductive labourers," that 
we shall find those men of leisure, whose habitual 
pursuits are consumed in the development of thought, 
and the gradual accessions of knowledge ; those men of 
whom the sage of Judea declares, that " It is he who 
hath little business who shall become wise : how can 
he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and whose talk 
is of bullocks ? But they," — the men of leisure and 

Study, " WILL MAINTAIN THE STATE OF THE WORLD !" 

The prosperity and the happiness of a people include 
something more evident and more permanent than " the 
Wealth of a Nation."* 

There is a more formidable class of men of genius, 
who are heartless to the interests of literature. Like 



* Since this murmur has been uttered against the degrading views 
of some of those theorists, it afforded me pleasure to observe that 
Mr. Malthus has fully sanctioned its justness. On this head, at least, 
Mr. Malthus has amply confuted his stubborn and tasteless brothers. 
Alluding to the productions of genius, this writer observes, that, " to 
estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communi- 
cated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works 
have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they 
have elevated and enchanted their country. 1 ' Principles of Pol. Econ. 
p. 48. And hence he acknowledges, that "some unproductive 
labour is of much more use and importance than productive labour, 
but is incapable of being the subject of the gross calculations which 
relate to national wealth ; contributing to other sources of happiness 
besides those which are derived from matter." Political economists 
would have smiled with contempt on the querulous Porson, who once 
observed, that " it seemed to him very hard, that with all his critical 
knowledge of Greek, he could not get a hundred pounds." They would 
have demonstrated to the learned Grecian, that this was just as it ought 
to be; the same occurrence had even happened to Homer in his own 
country, where Greek ought to have fetched a higher price than in 
England; but, that both might have obtained this hundred pounds,, 
had the Grecian bard and the Greek professor been employed at the 
same stocking-frame together, instead of the Iliad. 



THOSE WHO ABANDON THEIR STUDIES. 9 

Cornelius Agrippa, who wrote on " the vanity of the 
arts and sciences," many of these are only tracing in the 
arts which they have abandoned their own inconstant 
tempers, their feeble tastes, and their disordered judg- 
ments. But with others of this class, study has usually 
served as the instrument, not as the object, of their 
ascent ; it was the ladder which they once climbed, but 
it was not the eastern star which guided and inspired. 
Such literary characters were Warburton, Watson, 
and Wilkes, who abandoned their studies' when their 
studies had served a purpose. 

Watson gave up his pursuits in chemistry the instant 
he obtained their limited reward, and the laboratory 
closed when the professorship was instituted. Such 
was the penurious love he bore for the science which 
he had adopted, that the extraordinary discoveries of 
thirty years subsequent to his own first essays, could 
never excite even an idle inquiry. He tells us that he 
preferred " his larches to his laurels :" the wretched 
jingle expressed the mere worldliness that dictated it. 
In the same spirit of calculation with which he had 
at first embraced science and literature, he abandoned 
them; and his ingenuous confession is a memorable 
example of that egotistic pride which betrayed in the 
literary character the creature of selfism and political 
ambition. 

We are accustomed to consider Wilkes merely as 
a political adventurer, and it may surprise to find this 
"city chamberlain" ranked among professed literary 
characters ; yet in his variable life there was a period 
when he cherished the aspirations of a votary. Once 



10 MEN IN OFFICE APT TO TREAT 

he desired Lloyd to announce the edition of Churchill, 
which he designed to enrich by a commentary ; and his 
correspondence on this subject, which has never ap- 
peared, would, as he himself tells us, afford a variety 
of hints and communications. Wilkes was then warmed 
by literary glory ; for on his retirement into Italy, he 
declared, " I mean to give myself entirely to our friend's 
work, and to my History of England. I wish to 
equal the dignity of Livy : I am sure the greatness 
and majesty of our nation demand an historian equal 
to him." They who have only heard of the intriguing 
demagogue, and witnessed the last days of the used 
voluptuary, may hardly imagine that Wilkes had ever 
cherished such elevated projects; but mob-politics made 
this adventurer's fortune, which fell to the lot of an epi- 
curean : and the literary glory he once sought he lived 
to ridicule, in the immortal diligence of Lord Chatham 
and of Gibbon. Dissolving life away, and consuming all 
his feelings on himself, Wilkes left his nearest relatives 
what he left the world — the memory of an anti-social 
being! This wit, who has bequeathed to us no wit ; 
this man of genius, who has formed no work of genius ; 
this bold advocate for popular freedom, who sunk his 
patriotism in the chamberlainship ; was indeed desirous 
of leaving behind him some trace of the life of an escroc, 
in a piece of autobiography, which, for the benefit of 
the world, has been thrown to the flames. 

Men who have ascended into office through its gra- 
dations, or have been thrown upwards by accident, are 
apt to view others in a cloud of passions and politics. 
They who once commanded us by their eloquence, come 



LITERARY MEN WITH CONTEMPT. 11 

at length to suspect the eloquent ; and in their " pride 
of office," would now drive us by that single force of 
despotism which is the corruption of political power. 
Our late great minister, Pitt, has been reproached even 
by his friends for the contemptuous indifference with 
which he treated literary men. Perhaps Burke him- 
self, long a literary character, might incur some portion 
of this censure, by involving the character itself in the 
odium of a monstrous political sect. These political 
characters resemble Adrian "VI., who obtaining the tiara 
as the reward of his studies, afterwards persecuted lite- 
rary men, and, say the Italians, dreaded lest his brothers 
might shake the pontificate itself.* 

Worse fares it with authors when minds of this cast 
become the arbiters of public opinion ; for the greatest 
of writers may unquestionably be forced into ridiculous 
attitudes, by the well-known artifices practised by 
modern criticism. The elephant, no longer in his forest 
struggling with his hunters, but falling entrapped by a 
paltry snare, comes at length, in the height of ill-fortune, 
to dance on heated iron at the bidding of the pantaloon 
of a fair. Whatever such critics may plead to mortify 

* It has been suspected that Adrian VI. has been calumniated, for that 
this pontiff was only too sudden to begin the reform he meditated. 
But Adrian VI. was a scholastic whose austerity turned away with con- 
tempt from all ancient art, and was no brother to contemporary genius. 
He was one of the cui bono race, a branch of our political economists, 
When they showed him the Laocoon, Adrian silenced their raptures 
by the frigid observation, that all such things were idola antiquorum ; 
and ridiculed the amena lettaratura till every man of genius retreated 
from his court. Had Adrian's reign extended beyond its brief period, 
men of taste in their panic imagined that in his zeal the Pontiff would 
have calcined the fine statues of ancient art, to expedite the edifice of 
St. Peter. 



12 ARBITERS OF PUBLIC OPINION 

the vanity of authors, at least it requires as much 
vanity to give effect to their own polished effrontery.* 
Scorn, sarcasm, and invective, the egotism of the vain, 
and the irascibility of the petulant, where they succeed 
in debilitating genius of the consciousness of its powers, 
are practising the witchery of that ancient superstition 
of " tying the knot," which threw the youthful bride- 
groom into utter despair by its ideal forcefulness.f 

That spirit of levity which would shake the columns 
of society, by detracting from or burlesquing the elevat- 

* Listen to a confession and a recantation of an illustrious sinner ; 
the Coryphaeus of the amusing and new-found art, or artifice, of modern 
criticism. In the character of Burks, the Edinburgh Reviewer, with 
his peculiar felicity of manner, attacked the character of the man of 
genius; hut when Mr. Campbell vindicated his immortal brother witb 
all the inspiration of the family feeling, our critic, who is one of those 
great artists who acquire at length the utmost indifference even for 
their own works, generously avowed, that, " a certain tone of exaggera- 
tion is incidental we fear to the sort of writing in which we are 
engaged. Reckoning a little too much on the dulness of our readers, 
we are often led to overstate our sentiments ; when a little contro- 
versial warmth is added to a little love of effect, an excess of colour- 
ing steals over the canvass, which ultimately offends no eye so much as 
our own." But what if this love of effect in the critic has been too 
often obtained at the entire cost of the literary characters the fruits of 
whose studious days at this moment lie withering in oblivion, or whose 
genius the critic has deterred from pursuing the career it had opened for 
itself! To have silenced the learned, and to have terrified the modest, 
is the barbarous triumph of a Hun or a Vandal ; and the vaunted free- 
dom of the literary republic departed from us, when the vacillating 
public blindly consecrated the edicts of the demagogues of literature, 
whoever they may be. 

A reaction appears in the burlesque or bantering spirit. While one 
faction drives out another, the abuse of extraordinary powers is equally 
fatal. Thus we are consoled while we are afflicted, and we are pro- 
tected while we are degraded. 

t Nouer I'aiguillette, of which the extraordinary effect is described 
by Montaigne, is an Oriental custom still practised. — Mr. Hobhouse's 
Journey through Albania, p. 528. 



TREATED WITH LEVITY. 13 

ing principles which have produced so many illustrious 
men, has recently attempted to reduce the labours of 
literature to a mere curious amusement : a finished 
composition is likened to a skilful game of billiards, or 
a piece of music finely executed;, and curious researches, 
to charades and other insignificant puzzles. With such, 
an author is an idler who will not be idle, amusing or 
fatiguing others who are completely so. The result of 
a work of genius is contracted to the art of writing ; 
but this art is only its last perfection. Inspiration is 
drawn from a deeper source, enthusiasm is diffused 
through contagious pages, and without these movements 
of the soul, how poor and artificial a thing is that spark- 
ling composition, which flashes with the cold vibrations 
of mere art, or artifice. We have been recently told, on 
critical authority, that " a great genius should never 
allow himself to be sensible to his own celebrity, nor 
deem his pursuits of much consequence, however im- 
portant or successful." A sort of catholic doctrine, to 
mortify an author into a saint, extinguishing the glori- 
ous appetite of fame by one Lent all the year, and self- 
flagellation every day ! Buffon and Gibbon, Vol- 
taire and Pope, who gave to literature all the cares, 
the industry, and the glory of their lives, assuredly 
were too " sensible to their celebrity, and deemed their 
pursuits of much consequence," particularly when " im- 
portant and successful." The self-possession of great 
authors sustains their own genius by a sense of their 
own glory. 

Such, then, are some of the domestic treasons of the 
literary character against literature — " Et tu, Brute ! " 



14 LITERARY ARBITERS. 

But the hero of literature outlives his assassins, and 
might address them in that language of poetry and 
affection with which a Mexican king reproached his 
traitorous counsellors : " You were the feathers of my 
wings, and the eyelids of my eyes." 



POETS AND PAINTERS. 15 



CHAPTER III. 

Of artists, in the history of men of literary genius Their habits and 

pursuits analogous. — The nature of their genius is similar in their 
distinct works. — Shown by their parallel aeras, and by a common 
end pursued by both. 

Artists and literary men, alike insulated in their 
studies, pass through the same permanent discipline ; 
and thus it has happened that the same habits and feel- 
ings, and the same fortunes, have accompanied men who 
have sometimes unhappily imagined their pursuits not 
to be analogous. 

Let the artist share 
The palm ; he shares the peril, and dejected 
Faiuts o'er the labour unapproved — alas ! 
Despair and genius U— 

The congenial histories of literature and art describe 
the same periodical revolutions and parallel aeras. After 
the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the 
silver, and at length precipitately descend into the 
iron. In the history of painting, after the splendid 
epoch of Raphael, Titian, and Corregio, we meet with 
pleasure the Carraccis, Domenichino, Guido, and Al- 
bano ; as we read Paterculus, Quintilian, Seneca, Juve- 
nal, and Silius Italicus, after their immortal masters, 
Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Horace. 

It is evident that Milton, Michael Angelo, and 
Handel, belong to the same order of minds ; the same 



16 POETS AND PAINTERS 

imaginative powers, and the same sensibility, are only 
operating with different materials. Lanzi, the delight- 
ful historian of the Storia Pittorica, is prodigal of his 
comparisons of the painters with the poets ; his delicacy 
of perception discerned the refined analogies which for 
ever unite the two sisters, and he fondly dwelt on the 
transplanted flowers of the two arts : " Chi sente eke sia 
Tibullo net poetare sente chi sia Andrea (del Sarto) nel 
dipingere j" he who feels what Tibullus is in poetry, 
feels what Andrea is in painting. Michael Angelo, 
from his profound conception of the terrible and the 
difficult in art, was called its Dante ; from the Italian 
poet the Italian sculptor derived the grandeur of his 
ideas ; and indeed the visions of the bard had deeply 
nourished the artist's imagination; for once he had 
poured about the margins of his own copy their ethereal 
inventions, in the rapid designs of his pen. And so 
Bellori informs us of a very curious volume in manu- 
script, composed by Rubens, which contained, among 
other topics concerning art, descriptions of the passions 
and actions of men, drawn from the poets, and demon- 
strated to the eye by the painters. Here were battles, 
shipwrecks, sports, groups, and other incidents which 
were transcribed from Virgil and other poets, and by 
their side Rubens had copied what he had met with on 
those subjects from Raphael and the antique. 

The poet and the painter are only truly great by the 
mutual influences of their studies, and the jealousy of 
glory has only produced an idle contest. This old family 
quarrel for precedence, was renewed by our estimable 
President, in his brilliant " Rhymes on Art';" where he 



INFLUENCE EACH OTHER. 17 

maintains that " the narrative of an action is not com- 
parable to the action itself before the eyes •" while the 
enthusiast Barry considers painting as " poetry real- 
ised." This error of genius, perhaps first caught from 
Richardson's bewildering pages, was strengthened by 
the extravagant principle adopted by Darwin, who, to 
exalt his solitary talent of descriptive poetry, asserted 
that ei the essence of poetry was picture." The philo- 
sophical critic will find no difficulty in assigning to each 
sister-art her distinct province ; and it is only a pleasing 
delirium, in the enthusiasm of artists, which has con- 
fused the boundaries of these arts. The dread pathetic 
story of Dante's Ugolino, under the plastic hand of 
Michael Angelo, formed the subject of a basso-relievo, 
and Reynolds, with his highest effort, embodied the 
terrific conception of the poet as much as his art per- 
mitted ; but assuredly both these great artists would 
never have claimed the precedence of the Dantesc 
genius, and might have hesitated at the rivalry. 

Who has not heard of that one common principle 
which unites the intellectual arts, and who has not felt 
that the nature of their genius is similar in their dis- 
tinct works ? Hence curious inquirers could never 
decide whether the group of the Laocoon in sculpture 
preceded or was borrowed from that in poetry. Les- 
sing conjectures that the sculptor copied the poet. It 
is evident that the agony of Laocoon was the common 
end where the sculptor and the poet were to meet ; and 
we may observe that the artists in marble and in verse 
skilfully adapted their variations to their respective art : 
the one having to prefer the nude, rejected the veiling 
c 



18 POETS AND PAINTERS 

fillet from the forehead, that he might not conceal its 
deep expression, and the drapery of the sacrificial robe, 
that he might display the human form in visible agony ; 
but the other, by the charm of verse, could invest the 
priest with the pomp of the pontifical robe without 
hiding from us the interior sufferings of the human 
victim. We see they obtained by different means, 
adapted to their respective arts, that common end 
which each designed ; but who will decide which inven- 
tion preceded the other, or who was the greater 
artist ? 

This approximation of men apparently of opposite 
pursuits is so natural, that when Gesner, in his in- 
spiring letter on landscape-painting, recommends to the' 
young painter a constant study of poetry and litera- 
ture, the impatient artist is made to exclaim, " Must 
we combine with so many other studies those which 
belong to literary men? Must we read as well as 
paint ? " " It is useless to reply to this question ; for 
some important truths must be instinctively felt, per- 
haps the fundamental ones in the arts." A truly 
imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never absent 
when he meditated on the art he loved, Barry, thus 
vehemently broke forth : " Go home from the academy, 
light up your lamps, and exercise yourselves in the 
creative part of your art, with Homer, with Livy, and 
all the great characters 'ancient and modern, for your 
companions and counsellors." This genial intercourse 
of literature with art may be proved by painters who 
have suggested subjects to poets, and poets who have 
selected them for painters. Goldsmith suggested the 






INFLUENCE EACH OTHER. 19 

subject of the tragic and pathetic picture of Ugolino to 
the pencil of Reynolds. 

All the classes of men in society have their peculiar 
sorrows and enjoyments, as they have their peculiar 
habits and characteristics. In the history of men of 
genius we may often open the secret story of their 
minds, for they have above others the privilege of com- 
municating their own feelings ; and every life of a man 
of genius, composed by himself, presents us with the 
experimental philosophy of the mind. By living with 
their brothers, and contemplating their masters, they 
will judge from consciousness less erroneously than 
from discussion ; and in forming comparative views and 
parallel situations, they will discover certain habits and 
feelings, and find these reflected in themselves. 

Sydenham has beautifully said, whoever describes a 
violet exactly as to its colour, taste, smell, form, and 
other properties, will find the description agree in most 
particulars with all the violets in the universe. 



c 2 



20 MINDS CONSTITUTIONALLY DIFFERENT 



CHAPTER IV. 

Of natural genius. — Minds constitutionally different cannot have an 
equal aptitude. — Genius not the result of habit and education. — 
Originates in peculiar qualities of the mind. — The predisposition of 
genius. — A substitution for the white paper of Locke.* 

That faculty in art which individualises the artist, 
belonging to him and to no other, and which in a work 
forms that creative part whose likeness is not found in 
any other work, — is it inherent in the constitutional 
dispositions of the creator, or can it be formed by 
patient acquisition ? 

Astonished at their own silent and obscure progress, 
some have imagined that they had formed their genius 
solely by their own studies; when they generated, 
they conceived that they had acquired ; and, losing the 
distinction between nature and habit, with fatal teme- 
rity the idolatry of philosophy substituted something 
visible and palpable, yet shaped by the most opposite 
fancies, called a Theory, for nature herself! Men of 
genius, whose great occupation is to be conversant with 

* In the second edition of this work in 1818, T touched on some 
points of this inquiry in the second chapter : I almost despaired to find 
any philosopher sympathise with the subject, so invulnerable, they 
imagine, are the entrenchments of their theories. I was agreeably 
surprised to find these ideas taken up in the Edinburgh Review for 
August, 1820, in an entertaining article on Reynolds. I have, no 
doubt, profited by the perusal, though this chapter was prepared before 
I met with that spirited vindication of " an inherent difference in the 
organs or faculties to receive impressions of any kind." 






CANNOT HAVE AN EQUAL APTITUDE. 21 

the inspirations of nature, made np a factitious one 
among themselves, and assumed that they could operate 
without the intervention of the occult original. But 
Nature would not be mocked ; and whenever this race 
of idolaters have worked without her agency, she has 
afflicted them with the most stubborn sterility. 

Theories of genius are the peculiar constructions of 
our own philosophical times ; ages of genius had passed 
away, and they left no other record than their works ; 
no preconcerted theory described the workings of the 
imagination to be without imagination, nor did they 
venture to teach how to invent invention. 

The character of genius, viewed as the effect of 
liabit and education, on the principle of the equality 
of the human mind, infers that men have an equal 
aptitude for the work of genius : a paradox which, 
with a more fatal one, came from the French school, 
and arose probably from an equivocal expression. 

Locke employed the well-known comparison of the 
mind with u white paper void of all characters," to 
free his famous " Inquiry" from that powerful obstacle 
to his system, the absurd belief of " innate ideas," of 
notions of objects before objects were presented to 
observation. Our philosopher considered that this 
simple analogy sufficiently described the manner in 
which he conceived the impressions of the senses write 
themselves on the mind. His French pupils, the 
amusing Helvetius, or Diderot, for they were equally 
concerned in the paradoxical " L'Esprit," inferred that 
this blank paper served also as an evidence that men 
had an equal aptitude for genius •, just as the blank paper 



22 GENIUS NOT THE RESULT OF 

reflects to us whatever characters we trace on it. This 
equality of minds gave rise to the same monstrous 
doctrine in the science of metaphysics which that of 
another verbal misconception, the equality of men, did 
in that of politics. The Scottish metaphysicians power- 
fully combined to illustrate the mechanism of the mind, 
— an important and a curious truth ; for as rules and 
principles exist in the nature of things, and when dis- 
covered are only thence drawn out, genius unconsciously 
conducts itself by a uniform process ; and when this 
process had been traced, they inferred that what was 
done by some men, under the influence of fundamental 
laws which regulate the march of the intellect, must 
also be in the reach of others, who, in the same circum- 
stances, apply themselves to the same study. But 
these metaphysicians resemble anatomists, under whose 
knife all men are alike. They know the structure of 
the bones, the movement of the muscles, and where 
the connecting ligaments lie ; but the invisible principle 
of life flies from their touch. It is the practitioner on 
the living body who studies in every individual that pecu- 
liarity of constitution which forms the idiosyncrasy. 

Under the influence of such novel theories of genius, 
Johnson defined it as " A Mind of large general powers 
accidentally determined by some particular direction." 
On this principle we must infer that the reasoning 
Locke, or the arithmetical De Moivre, could have 
been the musical and fairy Spenser. * This concep- 

* It is more dangerous to define than to describe; a dry definition 
excludes so much, an ardent description at once appeals to our 
sympathies. How much more comprehensive our great critic becomes, 



HABIT AND EDUCATION. 23 

tion of the nature of genius became prevalent. It 
induced the philosophical Beccaria to assert that every 
individual had an equal degree of genius for poetry 
and eloquence ; it runs through the philosophy of the 
elegant Dugald Stewart ; and Reynolds, the pupil of 
Johnson in literature, adopting the paradox, constructed 
his automatic system on this principle of equal aptitude. 
He says, " this excellence, however expressed by genius, 
taste, or the gift of Heaven, I am confident may be 
acquired." Reynolds had the modesty to fancy that 
so many rivals, unendowed by nature, might have 
equalled the magic of his own pencil : but his theory 
of industry, so essential to genius, yet so useless without 
it, too long stimulated the drudges of art, and left us 
without a Corregio or a Raphael ! Another man of 
genius caught the fever of the new system. Currie, 
in his eloquent Life of Burns, swells out the scene of 
genius to a startling magnificence ; for he asserts, that 
"the talents necessary to the construction of an Iliad, 
under different discipline and application, might have 
led armies to victory or kingdoms to prosperity ; might 
have wielded the thunder of eloquence, or discovered 
and enlarged the sciences." All this we find in the 
text; but in the clear intellect of this man of genius a 
vast number of intervening difficulties started up, and 
in a copious note the numerous exceptions show that 

when he nobly describes genius, " as the power of mind that collects, 
combines, amplifies, and animates; the energy without which judg- 
ment is cold, and knowledge is inert.'' And it is this power of 
Mind, this primary faculty and native aptitude, which we deem may 
exist separately from education and habit, since these are often found 
unaccompanied by genius. 



24 GENIUS ORIGINATES IN 

the assumed theory requires no other refutation than 
what the theorist has himself so abundantly and so 
judiciously supplied. There is something ludicrous 
in the result of a theory of genius which would place 
Hobbes and Erasmus, those timid and learned recluses, 
to open a campaign with the military invention and 
physical intrepidity of a Marlborough ; or conclude that 
the romantic bard of the " Fairy Queen," amidst the 
quickly-shifting scenes of his visionary reveries, could 
have deduced, by slow and patient watchings of the 
mind, the system and the demonstrations of Newton. 

Such theorists deduce the faculty called genius from 
a variety of exterior or secondary causes : zealously 
rejecting the notion that genius may originate in con- 
stitutional dispositions, and be only a mode of the 
individual's existence, they deny that minds are dif- 
ferently constituted. Habit and education, being more 
palpable and visible in their operations, and progressive 
in the development of the intellectual faculties, have 
been imagined fully sufficient to make the creative 
faculty a subject of acquirement. 

But when these theorists had discovered the curious 
fact, that we have owed to accident several men of genius, 
and when they laid open some sources which influenced 
genius in its progress, they did not go one step further, 
they did not inquire whether such sources and such acci- 
dents had ever supplied the want of genius in the indivi- 
dual ? Effects were here again mistaken for causes. Could 
Spenser have kindled a poet in Cowley, Richardson a 
painter in Reynolds, and Descartes a metaphysician in 
Malebranche, if those master-minds, pointed out as 



PECULIAR QUALITIES OF THE MIND. 25 

having been such from accident, had not first received 
the indelible mint-stamp struck by the hand of Nature, 
and which, to give it a name, we may be allowed to 
call the predisposition of genius ? The accidents so 
triumphantly held forth, which are imagined to have 
created the genius of these men, have occurred to a 
thousand who have run the same career ; but how 
does it happen that the multitude remain a multitude, 
and the man of genius arrives alone at the goal ? 

This theory, which long dazzled its beholders, was 
in time found to stand in contradiction with itself, and 
perpetually with their own experience. Reynolds 
pared down his decision in the progress of his lectures, 
often wavered, often altered, and grew more confused 
as he lived longer to look about him. * The infirm 
votaries of the new philosophy, with all their sources of 
genius open before them, went on multiplying medio- 
crity, while inherent genius, true to nature, still con- 
tinued rare in its solitary independence. 

Others have strenuously denied that we are born 
with any peculiar species of mind, and resolve the 
mysterious problem into capacity, of which men only 



* I transcribe the last opinions of Mr. Edgeworth. " As to original 
genius, and the effect of education in forming taste or directing talent, 
the last revisal of his opinions "was given by himself, in the introduction 
to the second edition of Professional Education. He was strengthened 
in his belief, that many of the great differences of intellect which 
appear in men, depend more upon the early cultivating the habit of 
attention than upon any disparity between the powers of one individual 
and another. Perhaps, he latterly allowed that there is more difference 
than he had formerly admitted between the natural powers of different 
persons; but not so great as is generally supposed." — Edgeworth' s 
Memoirs, ii. 388. 



26 PREDISPOSITION OF GEiNIUS. 

differ in the degree. They can perceive no distinction 
between the poetical and the mathematical genius ; and 
they conclude that a man of genius, possessing a general 
capacity, may become whatever he chooses, but is 
determined by his first acquired habit to be what he is.* 
In substituting the term capacity for that of genius ■, 
the origin or nature remains equally occult. How is it 
acquired, or how is it inherent ? To assert that any 
man of genius may become what he wills, those must 
fervently protest against who feel that the character of 
genius is such that it cannot be other than it is ; that 
there is an identity of minds, and that there exists an 
interior conformity as marked and as perfect as the 
exterior physiognomy. A Scotch metaphysician has 
recently declared that " Locke or Newton might have 
been as eminent poets as Homer or Milton, had they 
given themselves early to the study of poetry." It is 
well to know how far this taste will go. We believe 
that had these philosophers obstinately, against nature, 
persisted in the attempt, as some have unluckily for 
themselves, we should have lost two great philosophers, 
and have obtained two supernumerary poets. t 

* Johnson once asserted, that " the supposition of one man having 
more imagination, another more judgment, is not true ; it is only one 
man has more mind than another. He who has vigour may walk to 
the east as well as the west, if he happens to turn his head that way." 
Godwin was persuaded that all genius is a mere acquisition, for he 
hints at "infusing it," and making it a thing " heritable." Are- 
version which has been missed by the many respectable dunces -who 
have been sons of men of genius. 

•f" This very Scotch metaphysician, at the instant he lays down this 
postulate, acknowledges that " Dr. Beattie had talents for a poet, but 
apparently not for a philosopher ." It is amusing to learn another result 
of his ungenial metaphysics. This sage demonstrates and concludes 



PREDISPOSITION OF GENIUS. 27 

It would be more useful to discover another source 
of genius for philosophers and poets, less fallible than 
the gratuitous assumptions of these theorists. An 
adequate origin for peculiar qualities in the mind may 
be found in that constitutional or secret propensity 
which adapts some for particular pursuits, and forms 
the predisposition of genius. 

Not that we are bound to demonstrate what our 
adversaries have failed in proving ; we may still remain 
ignorant of the nature of genius, and yet be convinced 
that they have not revealed it. The phenomena of 
predisposition in the mind are not more obscure and 
ambiguous than those which have been assigned as the 
sources of genius in certain individuals. For is it more 
difficult to conceive that a person bears in his consti- 
tutional disposition a germ of native aptitude which is 
developing itself to a predominant character of genius, 
which breaks forth in the temperament and moulds the 
habits, than to conjecture that these men of genius could 
not have been such but from accident, or that they differ 
only in their capacity ? 

Every class of men of genius has distinct habits ; all 
poets resemble one another, as all painters and all 
mathematicians. There is a conformity in the cast of 
their minds, and the quality of each is distinct from the 
other, and the very faculty which fits them for one par- 



in these words, " It Avill therefore be found, with little exception, that 
a great poet is but an ordinary genius.' 1 '' Let this sturdy Scotch 
metaphysician never approach Pegasus — he has to fear, not his wings, 
but his heels. If some have written on genius with a great deal too 
much, others have written without any. 



28 PREDISPOSITION OF GENIUS. 

ticular pursuit, is just the reverse required for another. 
If these are truisms, as they may appear, we need 
not demonstrate that from which we only wish to draw 
our conclusion. Why does this remarkable similarity 
prevail through the classes of genius ? Because each, 
in their favourite production, is working with the same 
appropriate organ. The poetical eye is early busied 
with imagery ; as early will the reveries of the poetical 
mind be busied with the passions; as early will the 
painter's hand be copying forms and colours ; as early 
will the young musicians ear wander in the creation of 
sounds, and the philosopher's head mature its medita- 
tions. It is then the aptitude of the appropriate organ, 
however it varies in its character, in which genius seems 
most concerned, and which is connatural and connate 
with the individual, and, as it was expressed in old 
days, is born \sdth him. There seems no other source 
of genius ; for whenever this has been refused by nature, 
as it is so often, no theory of genius, neither habit nor 
education, have ever supplied its want. To discrimi- 
nate between the habit and the predisposition, is quite 
impossible ; because whenever great genius discovers 
itself, as it can only do by continuity, it has become a 
habit with the individual ; it is the fatal notion of habit 
having the power of generating genius, which has so 
long served to delude the numerous votaries of medio- 
crity. Natural or native power is enlarged by art; 
but the most perfect Art has but narrow limits, de- 
prived of natural disposition. 

A curious decision on this obscure subject may be 
drawn from an admirable judge of the nature of genius. 



THE " WHITE PAPER OF LOCKE. 29 

Akenside, in that fine poem which forms its history, 
tracing its source, sang, 

From Heaven my strains begin, from Heaven descends 
The flame of genius to the human breast. 

But in the final revision of that poem, which he left 
many years after, the bard has vindicated the solitary 
and independent origin of genius, by the mysterious 
epithet, 

"the chosen breast." 

The veteran poet was, perhaps, schooled by the vicissi- 
tudes of his own poetical life, and those of some of his 
brothers. 

Metaphors are but imperfect illustrations in metaphy- 
sical inquiries ; usually they include too little or take 
in too much. Yet fanciful analogies are not willingly 
abandoned. The iconologists describe Genius as a 
winged child with a flame above its head ; the wings 
and the flame express more than some metaphysical 
conclusions. Let me substitute for "the white paper" 
of Locke, which served the philosopher in his descrip- 
tion of the operations of the senses on the mind, a less 
artificial substance. In the soils of the earth we may 
discover that variety of primary qualities which we 
believe to exist in human minds. The botanist and the 
geologist always find the nature of the strata indicative 
of its productions ; the meagre light herbage announces 
the poverty of the soil it covers, while the luxuriant 
growth of plants betrays the richness of the matrix in 
which the roots are fixed. It is scarcely reasoning by 
analogy to apply this operating principle of nature to 
the faculties of men. 



30 CONCLUDING REFLECTION. 

But while the origin and nature of that faculty which 
we understand by the term Genius remains still wrapt 
up in its mysterious bud, may we not trace its history 
in its votaries ? If Nature overshadow with her wings 
her first causes, still the effects lie open before us, and 
experience and observation will often deduce from con- 
sciousness what we cannot from demonstration. If 
Nature, in some of her great operations, has kept back 
her last secrets ; if Newton, even in the result of his 
reasonings, has religiously abstained from penetrating 
into her occult connexions, is it nothing to be her histo- 
rian, although we cannot be her legislator ? 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 31 



CHAPTER V. 

Youth of genius. — Its first impulses may be illustrated by its subsequent 
actions. — Parents have another association of the man of genius than 

we Of genius, its first habits Its melancholy. — Its reveries. — 

Its love of solitude. — Its disposition to repose. — Of a youth distin- 
guished by his equals. — Feebleness of its first attempts. — Of genius 
not discoverable even in manhood. — The education of the youth may 
not be that of his genius. — An unsettled impulse, querulous till it 
Ann's its true occupation. — With some, curiosity as intense a faculty 
as invention. — What the youth first applies to is commonly his 
delight afterwards. — Facts of the decisive character of genius. 

We are entering into a fairy land, touching only- 
shadows, and chasing the most changeable lights ; many 
stories we shall hear, and many scenes w T ill open on us; 
yet though realities are but dimly to be traced in this 
twilight of imagination and tradition, we think that the 
first impulses of genius may be often illustrated by the 
subsequent actions of the individual ; and whenever we 
find these in perfect harmony, it will be difficult to con- 
vince us that there does not exist a secret connexion 
between those first impulses and these last actions. 

Can we then trace in the faint lines of his youth, an 
unsteady outline of the man ? In the temperament of 
genius may we not reasonably look for certain in- 
dications or predispositions, announcing the permanent 
character? Is not great sensibility born with its irri- 
table fibres? Will not the deep retired character cling 
to its musings? And the unalterable being of intre- 
pidity and fortitude, will he not, commanding even 



32 THE FIRST IMPULSES OF GENIUS 

amidst his sports, lead on his equals ? The boyhood of 
Cato was marked by the sternness of the man, 
observable in his speech, his countenance, and his 
puerile amusements; and Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, 
Gray, and others, betrayed the same early appearance 
of their intellectual vigour and precocity of character. 

The virtuous and contemplative Boyle imagined 
that he had discovered in childhood that disposition of 
mind which indicated an instinctive ingenuousness. 
An incident which he relates, evinced, as he thought, 
that even then he preferred to aggravate his fault 
rather than consent to suppress any part of the truth, 
an effort which had been unnatural to his mind. His 
fanciful, yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. 
" This trivial passage," the little story alluded to, " I 
have mentioned now, not that I think that in itself it 
deserves a relation, but because as the sun is seen best 
at his rising and his setting, so men's native dispositions 
are clearliest perceived whilst they are children, and 
when they are dying. These little sudden actions are 
the greatest discoverers of men's true humours." 

Alfieri, that historian of the literary mind, was 
conscious that even in his childhood the peculiarity and 
the melancholy of his character prevailed : a boyhood 
passed in domestic solitude, fed the interior feelings of 
his impassioned character; and in noticing some inci- 
dents of a childish nature, this man of genius observes, 
"Whoever will, reflect on these inept circumstances, 
and explore into the seeds of the passions of man, 
possibly may find these neither so laughable nor so 
puerile as they may appear." His native genius, or by 



ILLUSTRATED BY SUBSEQUENT ACTIONS. 33 

whatever other term we may describe it, betrayed the 
wayward predispositions of some of his poetical 
brothers : " Taciturn and placid for the most part, but 
at times loquacious and most vivacious, and usually in 
the most opposite extremes; stubborn and impatient 
against force, but most open to kindness, more restrained 
by the dread of reprimand than by anything else, sus- 
ceptible of shame to excess, but inflexible if violently 
opposed." Such is the portrait of a child of seven years 
old, a portrait which induced the great tragic bard to 
deduce this result from his own self-experience, that 
u man is a continuation of the child.*" 

That the dispositions of genius in early life presage 
its future character, was long the feeling of antiquity. 
Cicero, in his Dialogue on Old Age, employs a beau- 
tiful analogy drawn from nature, marking her secret 
conformity in all things which have life and come from 
her hands; and the human mind is one of her plants. — 
{ Youth is the vernal season of life, and the blossoms it 
then puts forth are indications of those future fruits 
which are to be gathered in the succeeding periods." 
One of the masters of the human mind, after much 
previous observation of those who attended his lectures, 
would advise one to engage in political studies, then 
exhorted another to compose history, elected these to 
be poets, and those to be orators; for Isocrates 
believed that Nature had some concern in forming a 
man of genius, and endeavoured to guess at her secret 

* See in his Life, chap. IV., entitled Sviluppo dell' indole indicate 
da vari fattarelli. " Developement of genius, or natural inclination, 
indicated by various little matters." 



34 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

by detecting the first energetic inclination of the mind. 
This, also, was the principle which guided the Jesuits, 
those other great masters in the art of education. They 
studied the characteristics of their pupils with such 
singular care, as to keep a secret register in their 
colleges, descriptive of their talents, and the natural 
turn of their dispositions. In some cases they guessed 
with remarkable felicity. They described Fontenelle, 
adolescens omnibus numeris absoltitus et inter discipulos 
princeps, " a youth accomplished in every respect, and 
the model for his companions ;" but when they describe 
the elder Crebillon, puer ingeniosus sed insignis nebulo, 
" a shrewd boy, but a great rascal," they might not 
have erred so much as they appear to have done ; for 
an impetuous boyhood showed the decision of a cha- 
racter which might not have merely and misanthropi- 
cally settled in imaginary scenes of horror, and the 
invention of characters of unparalleled atrocity. 

In the old romance of King Arthur, when a cowherd 
comes to the King to request he would make his son a 
knight — " It is a great thing thou askest," said Arthur, 
who inquired whether this intreaty proceeded from him 
or his son? The old man's answer is remarkable — 
" Of my son, not of me ; for I have thirteen sons, and 
all these will fall to that labour I put them; but this 
child will not labour for me, for any thing that I and 
my wife will do ; but always he will be shooting and 
casting darts, and glad for to see battles, and to behold 
knights, and always day and night he desireth of me to 
be made a knight." The king commanded the cowherd 
to fetch all his sons ; they were all shapen much like 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 35 

the poor man ; but Tor was not like none of them in 
shape and in countenance, for he was much more than 
any of them. And so Arthur knighted him." This 
simple tale is the history of genius — the cowherd's 
twelve sons were like himself, but the unhappy genius 
in the family, who perplexed and plagued the cowherd 
and his wife and his twelve brothers, was the youth 
averse to the common labour, and dreaming of chivalry 
amidst a herd of cows. 

A man of genius is thus dropt among the people, and 
has first to encounter the difficulties of ordinary men, 
unassisted by that feeble ductility which adapts itself to 
the common destination. Parents are too often the 
victims of the decided propensity of a son to a Virgil or 
a Euclid ; and the first step into life of a man of genius 
is disobedience and grief. Lilly, our famous astrologer, 
has described the frequent situation of such a youth, 
like the cowherd's son who would be a knight. Lilly 
proposed to his father that he should try his fortune in 
the metropolis, where he expected that his learning and 
his talents would prove serviceable to him ; the father, 
quite incapable of discovering the latent genius of his 
son in his studious dispositions, very willingly consented 
to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, " I could not 
work, drive the plough, or endure any country labour; 
my father oft would say I was good for nothing" — 
words which the fathers of so many men of genius have 
repeated. 

In reading the memoirs of a man of genius, we often 
reprobate the domestic persecutions of those who 
opposed his inclinations. No poet but is moved with 
d 2 



36 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

indignation at the recollection of the tutor at the Port- 
Royal thrice burning the romance which Racine at 
length got by heart; no geometrician but bitterly 
inveighs against the father of Pascal for not suffering 
him to study Euclid, which he at length understood 
without studying. The father of Petrarch cast to the 
flames the poetical library of his son amidst the shrieks, 
the groans, and the tears of the youth. Yet this burnt- 
offering neither converted Petrarch into a sober lawyer, 
nor deprived him of the Roman laurel. The uncle of 
Alpieri for more than twenty years suppressed the 
poetical character of this noble bard ; he was a poet 
without knowing how to write a verse, and Nature, 
like a hard creditor, exacted, with redoubled interest, all 
the genius which the uncle had so long kept from her. 
These are the men whose inherent impulse no human 
opposition, and even no adverse education, can deter 
from proving them to be great men. 

Let us, however, be just to the parents of a man of 
genius ; they have another association of ideas respect- 
ing him than ourselves. We see a great man, they a 
disobedient child; we track him through his glory, 
they are wearied by the sullen resistance of one who 
is obscure and seems useless. The career of genius is 
rarely that of fortune or happiness ; and the father, 
who himself may be not insensible to glory, dreads 
lest his son be found among that obscure multitude, 
that populace of mean artists, self-deluded yet self- 
dissatisfied, who must expire at the barriers of 
mediocrity. 

If the youth of genius be struggling with a concealed 



GENIUS DELIGHTS IN SOLITUDE. 37 

impulse, lie will often be thrown into a train of secret 
instruction which no master can impart. Hippocrates 
profoundly observed, that " our natures have not been 
taught us by any master." That faculty which the 
youth of genius displays in after-life, may exist long 
ere it is perceived ; and it will only make its own 
what is homogeneous with itself. We may often observe 
how the mind of this youth stubbornly rejects whatever 
is contrary to its habits, and alien to its affections. Of 
a solitary character, for solitariness is the wild nurse of 
his contemplations, he is fancifully described by one 
of the race — and here fancies are facts : 

' ' He is retired as noon-tide dew, 
Or fountain in a noon- day grove." 

The romantic Sidney exclaimed, " Eagles fly alone, 
and they are but sheep which always herd together." 

As yet this being, in the first rudiments of his sen- 
sations, is touched by rapid emotions, and disturbed by 
a vague restlessness ; for him the images of nature are 
yet dim, and he feels before he thinks ; for imagination 
precedes reflection. One truly inspired unfolds the 
secret story — 

" Endow' d -with all that Nature can bestow, 
The child of fancy oft in silence bends 
O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast 
With conscious pride. From thence he oft resolves 
To frame he knows not what excelling things ; 
And win he knows not what sublime reward 
Of praise and wonder ! " — 

But the solitude of the youth of genius has a local 
influence ; it is full of his own creations of his unmarked 



38 GENIUS DELIGHTS IN SOLITUDE. 

passions and his uncertain thoughts. The titles which 
he gives his favourite haunts, often intimate the bent 
of his mind — , its employment, or its purpose ; as 
Petrarch called his retreat Lintemum, after that of 
his hero Scipio ; and a young poet, from some favourite 
description in Cowley, called a spot he loved to muse 
in, " Cowley's Walk." 

A temperament of this kind has been often mistaken 
for melancholy. " When the intermission of my studies 
allowed me leisure for recreation," says Boyle, of his 
early life, " I would very often steal away from all 
company, and spend four or five hours alone in the 
fields, and think at random ; making my delighted 
imagination the busy scene where some romance or 
other was daily acted." This circumstance alarmed 
his friends, who concluded that he was overcome with 
a growing melancholy. Alfieri found himself in this 
precise situation, and experienced these undefinable 
emotions, when, in his first travels at Marseilles, his 
lonely spirit only haunted the theatre and the sea- 
shore ; the tragic drama was then casting its influences 
over his unconscious genius. Almost every evening, 
after bathing in the sea, it delighted him to retreat to 
a little recess where the land jutted out ; there would 
he sit, leaning his back against a high rock, which he 
tells us, " concealed from my sight every part of the 
land behind me, while before and around me I beheld 
nothing but the sea and the heavens : the sun, sinking 
into the waves, was lighting up and embellishing these 
two immensities ; there would I pass a delicious hour 
of fantastic ruminations, and there I should have com- 



GENIUS DELIGHTS IN SOLITUDE. 39 

posed many a poem, had I then known to write either 
in verse or prose in any language whatever." 

An incident of this nature is revealed to us by the 
other noble and mighty spirit of our times, who could 
most truly exhibit the history of the youth of genius, 
and he has painted forth the enthusiasm of the boy 
Tasso. 



From my very birth 



My soul was drunk -with love, which did pervade 

And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth ; 

Of objects all inanimate I made 

Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers 

And rocks whereby they grew, a paradise, 

Where I did lay me down within the shade 

Of waving trees, and dream 'd uncounted hours, 

Though I was chid for wandering." 

The youth of genius will be apt to retire from the 
active sports of his mates. Beattie paints himself in 
his own Minstrel : 

" Concourse, and noise, and toil he ever fled, 
Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray 
Of squabbling imps ; but to the forest sped." 

Bossuet would not join his young companions, and 
flew to his solitary task, while the classical boys avenged 
themselves by a schoolboy's villanous pun : stigma- 
tising the studious application of Bossuet by the bos 
suetus aratro w T hich frequent flogging had made them 
classical enough to quote. 

The learned Huet has given an amusing detail of 
the inventive persecutions of his schoolmates, to divert 
him from his obstinate love of study. " At length, in 
order to indulge my own taste, I would rise with the 



/ 



40 GENIUS DELIGHTS IN SOLITUDE. 

sun, while they were buried in sleep, and hide myself 
in the woods, that I might read and study in quiet ;" 
but they beat the bushes, and started in his burrow 
the future man of erudition. Sir William Jones was 
rarely a partaker in the active sports of Harrow ; it was 
said of Gray that he was never a boy ; the unhappy 
Chatterton and Burns were singularly serious in 
youth ; as were Hobbes and Bacon. Milton has 
preserved for us, in solemn numbers, his school-life — 

" When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing : all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do 
What might be puhlic good : myself I thought 
Born to that end, born to promote all truth, 
All righteous things." 

It is remarkable that this love of repose and musing 
is retained throughout life. A man of fine genius is 
rarely enamoured of common amusements or of robust 
exercises ; and he is usually unadroit where dexterity 
of hand or eye, or trivial elegancies, are required. This 
characteristic of genius was discovered by Horace in 
that Ode which schoolboys often versify. Beattie 
has expressly told us of his Minstrel, 

" The exploit of strength, dexterity, or speed 
To him nor vanity nor joy could bring." 

Alfieri said he could never be taught by a French 
dancing-master, whose art made him at once shudder 
and laugh. Horace, by his own confession, was a 
very awkward rider, and the poet could not always 
secure a seat on his mule ; Metastasio humorously 
complains of his gun ; the poetical sportsman could 



GENIUS DELIGHTS IN SOLITUDE. 41 

only frighten the hares and partridges ; the truth was, 
as an elder poet sings, 

" Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills 
Talk in a hundred voices to the rills, 
I, like the pleasing cadence of a line, 
Struck hy the concert of the sacred nine." 

And we discover the true " humour " of the indolent 
contemplative race in their great representatives Virgil 
and Horace. When they accompanied Mecsenas into 
the country, while the minister amused himself at ten- 
nis, the two bards reposed on a vernal bank amidst the 
freshness of the shade. The younger Pliny, who was 
so perfect a literary character, was charmed by the 
Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by nets, 
which admitted him to sit a whole day with his tablets 
and stylus ; so, says he, " should I return with empty 
nets, my tablets may at least be full." Thomson was 
the hero of his own " Castle of Indolence ;" and the 
elegant Waller infuses into his luxurious verses the 
true feeling : 

" Oh, how I long rny careless limhs to lay 
Under the plantane shade, and all the day 
Invoke the Muses and improve my vein." 

The youth of genius, whom Beattie has drawn after 
himself, and I after observation, a poet of great genius, 
as I understand, has declared to be " too effeminate 
and timid, and too much troubled with delicate nerves. 
The greatest poets of all countries," he continues, "have 
been men eminently endowed with bodily powers, and 
rejoiced and excelled in all manly exercises!' May not 
our critic of northern habits have often mistaken the 
art of the great poets in describing such " manly exer- 



42 GENIUS AVERSE TO MANLY EXERCISES. 

cises or bodily powers," for the proof of their " re- 
joicing and excelling in them?" Poets and artists, 
from their habits, are not usually muscular and robust. 
Continuity of thought, absorving reverie, and sedentary 
habits, will not combine with corporeal skill and 
activity. There is also a constitutional delicacy which 
is too often the accompaniment of a fine intellect. The 
inconveniences attached to the inferior sedentary labour- 
ers are participated in by men of genius ; the analogy 
is obvious, and their fate is common. Literary men 
may be included in Ramazzini's Treatise on the Diseases 
of Artisans. Rousseau has described the labours of 
the closet as enervating men, and weakening the consti- 
tution, while study wears the whole machinery of man, 
exhausts the spirits, destroys his strength, and renders 
him pusillanimous.* But there is a higher principle 
which guides us to declare that men of genius should 
not excel in " all manly exercises." Seneca, whose 
habits were completely literary, admonishes the man of 
letters that " Whatever amusement he chooses, he 
should not slowly return from those of the body to the 
mind, while he should be exercising the latter night 
and day." Seneca was aware that " to rejoice and 
excel in all manly exercises," would in some cases 
intrude into the habits of a literary man, and sometimes 
be even ridiculous. Mortimer, once a celebrated artist, 
was tempted by his athletic frame to indulge in frequent 
violent exercises ; and it is not without reason sus- 
pected, that habits so unfavourable to thought and 
Study precluded that promising genius from attaining 

* In the preface to the u Narcisse." 



AMUSEMENTS OF GENIUS. 43 

to the maturity of his talents, however he might have 
succeeded in invigorating his physical powers. 

But to our solitude. So true is it that this love of 
loneliness is an early passion, that two men of genius 
of very opposite characters, the one a French wit and 
the other a French philosopher, have acknowledged that 
they have felt its influence, and even imagined that they 
had discovered its cause. The Abbe de St. Pierre, in 
his political annals, tells us, " I remember to have 
heard old Segrais remark, that most young people of 
both sexes had at one time of their lives, generally 
about seventeen or eighteen years of age, an inclination 
to retire from the world. He maintained this to be a 
species of melancholy, and humorously called it the 
small-pox of the mind, because scarce one in a thou- 
sand escaped the attack. I myself have had this dis- 
temper, but am not much marked with it." 

But if the youth of genius be apt to retire from the 
ordinary sports of his mates, he will often substitute 
for them others, which are the reflections of those 
favourite studies which are haunting his young imagi- 
nation, as men in their dreams repeat the conceptions 
which have habitually interested them. The amuse- 
ments of such an idler have often been analogous to 
his later pursuits. Ariosto, while yet a school-boy, 
seems to have been very susceptible of poetry, for he 
composed a sort of tragedy from the story of Pyramus 
and Thisbe, to be represented by his brothers and sis- 
ters, and at this time also delighted himself in trans- 
lating the old French and Spanish romances. Sir Wil- 
liam Jones, at Harrow, divided the fields according to 



44 AMUSEMENTS OF GENIUS. 

a map of Greece, and to eacli schoolfellow portioned 
out a dominion ; and when wanting a copy of the Tem- 
pest to act from, he supplied it from his memory : we 
must confess that the boy Jones was reflecting in his 
amusements the cast of mind he displayed in his after- 
life, and evincing that felicity of memory and taste so 
prevalent in his literary character. Florian's earliest 
years were passed in shooting birds all day, and reading 
every evening an old translation of the Iliad : when- 
ever he got a bird remarkable for its size or its plumage, 
he personified it by one of the names of his heroes, and 
raising a funeral pyre, consumed the body : collecting 
the ashes in an urn, he presented them to his grand- 
father, with a narrative of his Patroclus or Sarpedon. 
We seem here to detect, reflected in his boyish sports, 
the pleasing genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, 
Gonsalvo of Cordova, and William Tell. Bacon, when 
a child, was so remarkable for thoughtful observation, 
that Queen Elizabeth used to call him " the young 
lord keeper." The boy made a remarkable reply, when 
her Majesty inquiring of him his age, he said, that " He 
was two years younger than her Majesty's happy reign." 
The boy may have been tutored ; but this mixture of 
gravity and ingenuity and political courtiership, un- 
doubtedly caught from his father's habits, afterwards 
characterised Lord Bacon's manhood. I once read the 
letter of a contemporary of Hobbes, where I found 
that this great philosopher, when a lad, used to ride on 
packs of skins to market, to sell them for his father, 
who was a fellmonger ; and that in the market-place he 
thus early began to vent his private opinions, which long 
afterwards so fully appeared in his writings. 



A YOUTH DISTINGUISHED BY HIS EQUALS. 45 

For a youth to be distinguished by his equals is per- 
haps a criterion of talent, At that moment of life, 
with no flattery on the one side, and no artifice on the 
other, all emotion and no reflection, the boy who has 
obtained a predominance has acquired this merely by 
native powers. The boyhood of Nelson was charac- 
terised by events congenial with those of his after days ; 
and his father understood his character when he declared 
that " in whatever station he might be placed, he would 
climb, if possible, to the top of the tree." Some puerile 
anecdotes which Franklin remembered of himself, 
betray the invention, and the firm intrepidity of his 
character, and even perhaps his carelessness of means to 
obtain a purpose. In boyhood he felt a desire for 
adventure ; but as his father would not consent to a 
sea-life, he made the river near him represent the ocean; 
he lived on the water, and was the daring Columbus of 
a schoolboy's boat. A part where he and his mates stood 
to angle, in time became a quagmire : in the course of 
one day the infant projector thought of a wharf for 
them to stand on, and raised it with a heap of stones 
deposited there for the building of a house. With that 
sort of practical wisdom, or Ulyssean cunning, which 
marked his mature character, Franklin raised his 
wharf at the expense of another's house. His contriv- 
ances to aid his puny labourers, with his resolution not 
to quit the great work till it was effected, seem to 
strike out to us the invention and decision of his future 
character. But the qualities which would attract the 
companions of a schoolboy, may not be those which 
are essential to fine genius. The captain or leader of 



46 FEEBLENESS OF THE 

his schoolmates is not to be disregarded : but it is the 
sequestered boy who may chance to be the artist or 
the literary character. Some facts which have been 
recorded of men of genius at this period are remark- 
able. We are told by Miss Seward, that Johnson, 
when a boy at the free-school, appeared " a huge over- 
grown misshapen stripling ;" but was considered as a 
stupendous stripling, " for even at that early period of 
life Johnson maintained his opinions with the same 
sturdy dogmatical and arrogant fierceness." The pue- 
rile characters of Lord Bolingbroke and Sir Robert 
Walpole, schoolfellows and rivals, were observed to 
prevail through their after-life ; the liveliness and 
brilliancy of Bolingbroke appeared in his attacks on 
Walpole, whose solid and industrious qualities tri- 
umphed by resistance. A parallel instance might be 
pointed out in two great statesmen of our own days ; 
in the wisdom of the one, and the wit of the other, 
men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends 
or enemies, as it happened. A curious observer, in 
looking over a collection of the Cambridge poems, 
which were formerly composed by its students, has 
remarked, that " Cowley from the first was quaint, 
Milton sublime, and Barrow copious ." If then the 
characteristic disposition may reveal itself thus early, 
it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected 
at this obscure period of youth. 

Is there then a period in youth which yields decisive 
marks of the character of genius ? The natures of men 
are as various as their fortunes. Some, like diamonds, 
must wait to receive their splendour from the slow 



FIRST ATTEMPTS OF GENIUS. 47 

touches of the polisher, while others, resembling pearls, 
appear at once born with their beauteous lustre. 

Among the inauspicious circumstances is the feeble- 
ness of the first attempts ; and we must not decide on 
the talents of a young man by his first works. Dryden 
and Swift might have been deterred from authorship, 
had their earliest pieces decided their fate. Smollett, 
before he knew which way his genius would conduct 
him, had early conceived a high notion of his talents 
for dramatic poetry : his tragedy of " The Regicide" 
was refused by Garrick, whom for a long time he could 
not forgive, but continued to abuse our Roscius through 
his works of genius, for having discountenanced his first 
work, which had none. Racine's earliest composition, 
as we may judge by some fragments his son has pre- 
served, remarkably contrast with his writings, for these 
fragments abound with those points and conceits which 
he afterwards abhorred. The tender author of Andro- 
mache could not have been discovered while exhausting 
himself in running after concetti as surprising as the 
worst parts of Cowley ; in whose spirit alone he could 
have hit on this perplexing concetto^ descriptive of 
Aurora ; " Fille du Jour, qui nais devant ton pere \" — 
"Daughter of Day, but born before thy father!" 
Gibbon betrayed none of the force and magnitude of 
his powers in his " Essay on Literature," or his at- 
tempted " History of Switzerland." Johnson's cadenced 
prose is not recognizable in the humbler simplicity of 
his earliest years. Many authors have begun un- 
successfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. 
Raphael, when he first drew his meagre forms under 






48 GENIUS NOT ALWAYS DISCOVERABLE 



Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal 
beauty, which one day he of all men could alone exe- 
cute. Who could have imagined, in examining the 
Dream of Raphael, that the same pencil could here- 
after have poured out the miraculous Transfiguration ? 
Or that in the imitative pupil of Hudson, our country 
was at length to pride herself on another Raphael ? 

Even the manhood of genius may pass unobserved by 
his companions, and, like iEneas, he may be hidden in 
a cloud amidst his associates. The celebrated Fabius 
Maxim cs in his boyhood was called in derision " the 
little sheep," from the meekness and gravity of his 
disposition. His sedateness and taciturnity, his indif- 
ference to juvenile amusements, his slowness and diffi- 
culty in learning, and his ready submission to his equals, 
induced them to consider him as one irrecoverably 
stupid. The greatness of mind, unalterable courage, 
and invincible character which Fabius afterwards dis- 
played, they then imagined had lain concealed under 
the apparent contrary qualities. The boy of genius 
may indeed seem slow and dull even to the phlegmatic; 
for thoughtful and observing dispositions conceal them- 
selves in timorous silent characters, who have not yet- 
experienced their strength ; and that assiduous love 
which cannot tear itself away from the secret instruc- 
tion it is perpetually imbibing, cannot be easily distin- 
guished from the pertinacity of the mere plodder. We 
often hear from the early companions of a man of genius, 
that at school he appeared heavy and unpromising. 
Rousseau imagined that the childhood of some men is 
accompanied by this seeming and deceitful dulness, 



EVEN IN EARLY MANHOOD. 49 

which is the sign of a profound genius ; and Roger 
Ascham has placed among " the best natures for learn- 
ing, the sad-natured and hard-witted child;" that is, 
the thoughtful, or the melancholic, and the slow. The 
young painters, to ridicule the persevering labours of 
Domexichino, which were at first heavy and unpro- 
mising, called him, " the great ox ;" and Passeri, while 
he has happily expressed the still labours of his con- 
cealed genius, sua taciturna Untezza, his silent slowness, 
expresses his surprise at the accounts he received of the 
early life of this great artist. " It is difficult to believe, 
what many assert, that from the beginning this great 
painter had a ruggedness about him, which entirely 
incapacitated him from learning his profession, and they 
have heard from himself that he quite despaired of suc- 
cess. Yet I cannot comprehend how such vivacious 
talents, with a mind so finely organised, and accom- 
panied with such favourable dispositions for the art, 
would show such signs of utter incapacity ; I rather 
think that it is a mistake in the proper knowledge of 
genius, which some imagine indicates itself most deci- 
sively by its sudden vehemence, showing itself like 
lightning, and like lightning passing away." 

A parallel case we find in Goldsmith, who passed 
through an unpromising youth; he declared that he 
was never attached to literature till he was thirty ; 
that poetry had no peculiar charms for him till that 
age ; * and, indeed, to his latest hour he was surprising 
his friends by productions which they had imagined he 

* This is a remarkable expression from Goldsmith : but it is much 
more so, when we hear it from Lord Byron. See a note in the follow- 
ing chapter, on " The first Studies." 

E 



50 GENIUS NOT ALWAYS DISCOVERABLE 

was incapable of composing. Hume was considered, 
for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to become 
a steady merchant ; and it was said of Boileau that he 
had no great understanding, but would speak ill of no 
one. This circumstance of the character in youth being 
entirely mistaken, or entirely opposite to the subse- 
quent one of mature life, has been noticed of many. 
Even a discerning parent or master has entirely failed 
to develop the genius of the youth, who has after- 
wards ranked among eminent men ; we ought as little 
to decide from early unfavourable appearances, as from 
inequality of talent. The great Isaac Barrow's father 
used to say, that if it pleased God to take from him 
any of his children, he hoped it might be Isaac, as the 
least promising ; and during the three years Barrow 
passed at the Charter-house, he was remarkable only 
for the utter negligence of his studies and of his person. 
The mother of Sheridan, herself a literary female, pro- 
nounced early, that he was the dullest and most hope- 
less of her sons. Bodmer, at the head of the literary 
class in Switzerland, who had so frequently discovered 
and animated the literary youths of his country, could 
never detect the latent genius of Gesner : after a 
repeated examination of the young man, he put his 
parents in despair with the hopeless award that a mind 
of so ordinary a cast must confine itself to mere writing 
and accompts. One fact, however, Bodmer had over- 
looked when he pronounced the fate of our poet and 
artist — the dull youth, who could not retain barren 
words, discovered an active fancy in the images of 
things. While at his grammar lessons, as it happened 
to Lucian, he was employing tedious hours in model- 



EVEN IN EARLY MANHOOD. 51 

ling in wax, groups of men, animals, and other figures, 
the rod of the pedagogue often interrupted the fingers 
of our infant moulder, who fnever ceased working to 
amuse his little sisters with his waxen creatures, which 
constituted all his happiness. Those arts of imitation 
were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to 
which afterwards it became so entirely devoted. 

Thus it happens that in the first years of life the 
education of the youth may not be the education of his 
genius ; he lives unknown to himself and others. In 
all these cases nature had dropt the seeds in the soil : 
but even a happy disposition must be concealed amidst 
adverse circumstances : I repeat that genius can only 
make that its own, which is homogeneous with its 
nature. It has happened to some men of genius during 
a long period of their lives, that an unsettled impulse, 
unable to discover the object of its aptitude, a thirst 
and fever in the temperament of too sentient a being, 
which cannot find the occupation to which only it can 
attach itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous 
spirit, weary with the burthen of existence; but the 
instant the latent talent had declared itself, his first 
work, the eager offspring of desire and love, has asto- 
nished the world at once with the birth and the 
maturity of genius. 

We are told that Pellegrino Tibaldi, who after- 
wards obtained the glorious title of "the reformed 
Michael Angelo," long felt the strongest internal dis- 
satisfaction at his own proficiency ; and that one day, 
in melancholy and despair, he had retired from the city, 
resolved to starve himself to death : his friend discovered 
him, and having persuaded him to change his pursuits 
e2 



52 GENIUS SUDDENLY INFLUENCED. 

from painting to architecture, he soon rose to eminence. 
This story D'Argenville throws some doubt over ; but 
as Tibaldi during twenty years abstained from his 
pencil, a singular circumstance seems explained by an 
extraordinary occurrence. Tasso with feverish anxiety 
pondered on five different subjects before he could 
decide in the choice of his epic ; the same embarrass- 
ment was long the fate of Gibbon on the subject of his 
History. Some have sunk into a deplorable state of 
utter languishment, from the circumstance of being 
deprived of the means of pursuing their beloved study, 
as in the case of the chemist Bergman. His friends, 
to gain him over to the more lucrative professions, 
deprived him of his books of natural history ; a plan 
which nearly proved fatal to the youth, who with 
declining health quitted the university. At length 
ceasing to struggle with the conflicting desire within 
him, his renewed enthusiasm for his favourite science 
restored the health he had lost in abandoning it. 

It was the view of the tomb of Virgil which so 
powerfully influenced the innate genius of Boccaccio, 
and fixed his instant decision. As yet young, and in 
the neighbourhood of Naples, wandering for recreation, 
he reached the tomb of the Mantuan. Pausing before 
it, his youthful mind began to meditate. Struck by 
the universal glory of that great name, he lamented his 
own fortune to be occupied by the obscure details 01 
merchandize ; already he sighed to emulate the fame of 
the Roman, and as Villani tells us, from that day he 
abandoned for ever the occupations of commerce, dedi- 
cating himself to literature. Proctor, the lost Phidias 
of our country, would often say, that he should never 



PRECOCITY OF GENIUS. 53 

have quitted his mercantile situation, but for the acci- 
dental sight of Barry's picture of Venus rising from the 
sea; a picture which produced so immediate an effect on 
his mind, that it determined him to quit a lucrative 
occupation. Surely we cannot account for such sudden 
effusions of the mind, and such instant decisions, but by 
the principle of that predisposition which only waits for 
an occasion to declare itself. 

Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally disco- 
vering itself in youth. In general, perhaps, a master- 
mind exhibits precocity. " Whatever a young man at 
first applies himself to, is commonly his delight after- 
wards." This remark was made by Hartley, who 
has related an anecdote of the infancy of his genius, 
which indicated the manhood. He declared to his 
daughter that the intention of writing a book upon the 
nature of man, was conceived in his mind when he was 
a very little boy — when swinging backwards and for- 
wards upon agate, not more than nine or ten years old; 
he was then meditating upon the nature of his own 
mind, how man was made, and for what future end. 
Such was the true origin, in a boy of ten years old, of 
his celebrated book on " The Frame, the Duty, and the 
Expectation of Man." John Hunter conceived his 
notion of the principle of life, which to his last day 
formed the subject of his inquiries and experiments, 
when he was very young ; for at that period of life, 
Mr. Abernethy tells us, he began his observations on 
the incubated egg, which suggested or corroborated 
his opinions. 

A learned friend, and an observer of men of science, 
has supplied me with a remark highly deserving notice. 



54 PRECOCITY OF GENIUS. 

It is an observation that will generally hold good, that 
the most important systems of theory, however late they 
may be published, have been formed at a very early 
period of life. This important observation may be 
verified by some striking facts. A most curious one 
will be found in Lord Bacon's letter to Father 
Fulgentio, where he gives an account of his projecting 
his philosophy thirty years before, during his youth. 
Milton from early youth mused on the composition of 
an Epic. De Thou has himself told us, that from his 
tender youth his mind was full of the idea of composing 
a history of his own times; and his whole life was 
passed in preparation, and in a continued accession of 
materials for a future period. From the age of twenty, 
Montesquieu was preparing the materials of & Esprit 
des LoiX) by extracts from the immense volumes of civil 
law. Tillemont's vast labours were traced out in his 
mind at the early age of nineteen, on reading Baronius ; 
and some of the finest passages in Racine's tragedies 
were composed while a pupil, wandering in the woods 
of the Port-Royal. So true is it that the seeds of many 
of our great literary and scientific works were lying, 
for many years antecedent to their being given to the 
world, in a latent state of germination.* 



* I need not to be reminded, that I am not worth mentioning among 
the illustrious men who have long formed the familiar subjects of my 
delightful researches. But with the middling as well as with the great, 
the same habits must operate. Early in life, I was struck by the in- 
ductive philosophy of Bacon, and sought after a Moral Experimental 
Philosophy; and I had then in my mind an observation of Lord 
Bolingbroke's, for I see I quoted it thirty years ago, that "Abstract or 
general propositions, though never so true, appear obscure or doubtful 
to us very often till they are explained by examples. 1 ' So far back as 
in 1793, 1 published " a Dissertation on Anecdotes," with the simpli- 



THE INSTINCT OF CURIOSITY. 55 

The predisposition of genius has declared itself in 
painters and poets, who were such before they under- 
Stood the nature of colours and the arts of verse ; and 
this vehement propensity, so mysteriously constitu- 
tional, may be traced in other intellectual characters be- 
sides those which belong to the class of imagination. It 
was said that Pitt was born a minister ; the late Dr. 
Shaw I always considered as one born a naturalist, and I 
know a great literary antiquary who seems to me to 
have been also born such; for the passion of curiosity 
is as intense a faculty, or instinct, with some casts of 
mind, as is that of invention with poets and painters : 
I confess that to me it is genius in a form in which 
genius has not yet been suspected to appear. One of 
the biographers of Sir Hans Sloane expresses himself 
in this manner : " Our authors thirst for knowledge 
seems to have been born with him; so that his Cabinet 
of Rarities may be said to have commenced with Ms 
being" This strange metaphorical style has only con- 
fused an obscure truth. Sloane early in life felt an 
irresistible impulse which inspired him with the most 
enlarged views of the productions of nature, and he 
exulted in their accomplishment; for in his will he has 
solemnly recorded, that his collections were the fruits of 
his early devotion ; having had from my youth a strong 
inclination to the study of 'plants and all other productions 
of nature. The vehement passion of Peiresc for know- 
ledge, according to accounts which Gassendi received 

city of a young votary ; there I deduced results, and threw out a mag- 
nificent project not very practicable. From that time to the hour I am 
now writing, my metal has been running in this mould, and I still keep 
casting philosophy into anecdotes, and anecdotes into philosophy. As I 
began I fear I shall end. 



56 THE INSTINCT OF CURIOSITY. 

from old men who had known him as a child, broke out 
as soon as he had been taught his alphabet ; for then 
his delight was to be handling books and papers, and his 
perpetual inquiries after their contents obliged them to 
invent something to quiet the child's insatiable curiosity, 
who was hurt when told, that he had not the capacity 
to understand them. He did not study as an ordinary 
scholar, for he never read but with perpetual researches. 
At ten years of age, his passion for the studies of anti- 
quity was kindled at the sight of some ancient coins 
dug up in his neighbourhood ; then, that vehement 
passion for knowledge " began to burn like fire in a 
forest," as Gassendi happily describes the fervour and 
amplitude of the mind of this man of vast learning. 
Bayle, who was an experienced judge in the history of 
genius, observes on two friars, one of whom was 
haunted by a strong disposition to genealogical, and the 
other to geographical pursuits, that, " let a man do what 
he will, if nature incline us to certain things, there is no 
preventing the gratification of our desire, though it lies 
hid under a monk's frock." It is not, therefore, as the 
world is apt to imagine, only poets and painters for 
whom is reserved this restless and impetuous propensity 
for their particular pursuits ; I claim it for the man of 
science as well as for the man of imagination. — And I 
confess, that I consider this strong bent of the mind in 
men, eminent in pursuits in which imagination is little 
concerned, and whom men of genius have chosen to 
remove so far from their class, as another gifted apti- 
tude. They, too, share in the glorious fever of genius, 
and we feel how just was the expression formerly used, 
of " their thirst for knowledge." 






DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 57 

But to return to the men of genius who answer more 
strictly to the popular notion of inventors. We have 
Boccaccio's own words for a proof of his early natural 
tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of his genealogy 
of the Gods : " Before seven years of age, when as yet 
I had met with no stories, was without a master, and 
hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for 
fiction, and produced some little tales." Thus the 
Decamerone was appearing much earlier than we 
suppose. Descartes, while yet a boy, indulged such 
habits of deep meditation, that he was nicknamed by 
his companions " The Philosopher," always questioning, 
and ever settling the cause and the effect. He was 
twenty-five years of age before he left the army, but 
the propensity for meditation had been early formed ; 
and he has himself given an account of the pursuits 
which occupied his youth, and of the progress of his 
genius ; of the secret struggle which he so long main- 
tained with his own mind, wandering in concealment 
over the world for more than twenty years, and, as he 
says of himself, like the statuary labouring to draw out 
a Minerva from the marble block. Michael Angelo, 
as yet a child, wherever he went, busied himself in 
drawing ; and when his noble parents, hurt that a 
man of genius was disturbing the line of their ancestry, 
forced him to relinquish the pencil, the infant artist 
flew to the chisel : the art which was in his soul would 
not allow of idle hands. Lope de Vega, Velasquez, 
Ariosto, and Tasso, are all said to have betrayed at 
their school-tasks the most marked indications of their 
subsequent characteristics. 

This decision of the impulse of genius is apparent in 



'/ 



58 DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 

Murillo. This young artist was undistinguished at the 
place of his birth. A brother artist returning home 
from London, where he had studied under Van Dyk, 
surprised Murillo by a chaste, and to him hitherto 
unknown, manner. Instantly he conceived the project 
of quitting his native Seville and flying to Italy — the 
fever of genius broke forth with all its restlessness. 
But he was destitute of the most ordinary means to 
pursue a journey, and forced to an expedient, he pur- 
chased a piece of canvas, which, dividing into parts, 
he painted on each, figures of saints, landscapes, and 
flowers ; a humble merchandise of art adapted to the 
taste and devout feelings of the times, and which were 
readily sold to the adventurers to the Indies. With 
these small means he departed, having communicated 
his project to no one except to a beloved sister, whose 
tears could not prevail to keep the lad at home ; the 
impetuous impulse had blinded him to the perils and 
the impracticability of his wild project. He reached 
Madrid, whore the great Velasquez, his countryman, 
was struck by the ingenuous simplicity of the youth, 
who urgently requested letters for Rome ; but when 
that noble genius understood the purport of this 
romantic journey, Velasquez assured him that he 
need not proceed to Italy to learn the art he loved. 
The great master opened the royal galleries to the 
youth, and cherished his studies. Murillo returned 
to his native city, where from his obscurity he had 
never Jffeen missed, having ever lived a retired life of 
silent labour ; but this painter of nature returned to 
make the city which had not noticed his absence, the 
theatre of his glory. 



DECISIVE CHARACTER OP GENIUS. 59 

The same imperious impulse drove Callot, at the 
age of twelve years, from his father's roof. His parents, 
from prejudices of birth, had conceived that the art of 
engraving was one beneath the studies of their son ; 
but the boy had listened to stories of the miracles of 
Italian art, and with a curiosity predominant over 
any self-consideration, one morning the genius flew 
away. Many days had not elapsed, when finding 
himself in the utmost distress, with a gang of gipsies 
he arrived at Florence. A merchant of Nancy dis- 
covered him, and returned the reluctant boy of genius 
to his home. Again he flies to Italy, and again his 
brother discovers him, and reconducts him to his parents. 
The father, whose patience and forgiveness were now 
exhausted, permitted his son to become the most ori- 
ginal genius of French art ; one who, in his vivacious 
groups, the touch of his graver, and the natural expres- 
sion of his figures, anticipated the creations of Hogarth. 

Facts of this decisive character are abundant. See 
the boy Nanteuil hiding himself in a tree to pursue 
the delightful exercise of his pencil, while his parents 
are averse to their son practising his young art ! See 
Handel, intended for a doctor of the civil laws, and 
whom no parental discouragement could deprive of his 
enthusiasm, for ever touching harpsichords, and having 
secretly conveyed a musical instrument to a retired 
apartment, listen to him when, sitting through the 
night, he awakens his harmonious spirit ! Observe 
Ferguson, the child of a peasant, acquiring the art of 
reading without any one suspecting it, by listening to 
his father teaching his brother ; observe him making a 
wooden watch without the slightest knowledge of 



60 DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 

mechanism, and while a shepherd, studying, like an 
ancient Chaldean, the phenomena of the heavens, on a 
celestial globe formed by his own hand. That great 
mechanic, Smeaton, when a child, disdained the ordi- 
nary playthings of his age; he collected the tools of 
workmen, observed them at their work, and asked 
questions till he could work himself. One day, having 
watched some millwrights, the child was shortly after, 
to the distress of the family, discovered in a situation 
of extreme danger, fixing up at the top of a barn a 
rude windmill. Many circumstances of this nature 
occurred before his sixth year. His father, an attorney, 
sent him up to London to be brought up to the same 
profession ; but he declared that " the study of the law 
did not suit the bent of his genius ;" a term he frequently 
used. He addressed a strong memorial to his father, 
to show his utter incompetency to study law ; and the 
good sense of the father abandoned Smeaton " to the 
bent of his genius in his own way." Such is the 
history of the man who raised the Edystone lighthouse, 
in the midst of the waves, like the rock on which it 
stands. 

Can we hesitate to believe, that in such minds there 
was a resistless and mysterious propensity, " growing 
with the growth " of these youths, who seem to have 
been placed out of the influence of that casual excite- 
ment, or any other of those sources of genius, so fre- 
quently assigned for its production ? 

Yet these cases are not more striking than one 
related of the Abbe La Caille, who ranked among the 
first astronomers of the age. La Caille was the son of 
the parish clerk of a village. At the age of ten years 



DECISIVE CHARACTER OP GENIUS. 61 

his father sent him every evening to ring the church 
bell, but the boy always returned home late : his father 
was angry, and beat him, and still the boy returned an 
hour after he had rung the bell. The father, suspect- 
ing something mysterious in his conduct, one evening 
watched him. He saw his son ascend the steeple, ring 
the bell as usual, and remain there during an hour. 
When the unlucky boy descended, he trembled like 
one caught in the fact, and on his knees confessed that 
the pleasure he took in watching the stars from the 
steeple was the real cause which detained him from 
home. As the father was not born to be an astronomer, 
he flogged his son severely. The youth was found 
weeping in the streets by a man of science, who, when 
he discovered in a boy of ten years of age a passion for 
contemplating the stars at night, and one too, who had 
discovered an observatory in a steeple, decided that the 
seal of nature had impressed itself on the genius of that 
boy. Relieving the parent from the son, and the son 
from the parent, he assisted the young La Caille in 
his passionate pursuit, and the event completely justified 
the prediction. How children feel a predisposition for 
the studies of astronomy, or mechanics, or architecture, 
or natural history, is that secret in nature we have not 
guessed. There may be a virgin thought as well as a 
virgin habit — nature before education — which first 
opens the mind, and ever afterwards is shaping its 
tender folds. Accidents may occur to call it forth, 
but thousands of youths have found themselves in 
parallel situations with Smeaton, Ferguson, and La 
Caille, without experiencing their energies. 

The case of Clairon, the great French tragic actress, 



62 DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 

who seems to have been an actress before she saw a 
theatre, deserves attention. This female, destined to 
be a sublime tragedian, was of the lowest extraction ; 
the daughter of a violent and illiterate woman, who 
with blows and menaces was driving about the child all 
day to manual labour. " I know not," says Clairon, 
" whence I derived my disgust, but I could not bear 
the idea to be a mere workwoman, or to remain inac- 
tive in a corner." In her eleventh year, being locked 
up in a room as a punishment, with the windows 
fastened, she climbed upon a chair to look about her. 
A new object instantly absorbed her attention. In the 
house opposite she observed a celebrated actress amidst 
her family ; her daughter was performing her dancing 
lesson : the girl Clairon, the future Melpomene, was 
struck by the influence of this graceful and affectionate 
scene. " All my little being collected itself into my 
eyes ; I lost not a single motion ; as soon as the lesson 
ended, all the family applauded, and the mother em- 
braced the daughter. The difference of her fate and 
mine filled me with profound grief ; my tears hindered 
me from seeing any longer, and when the palpitations 
of my heart allowed me to re-ascend the chair, all had 
disappeared." This scene was a discovery ; from that 
moment Clairon knew no rest, and rejoiced when she 
could get her mother to confine her in that room. The 
happy girl was a divinity to the unhappy one, whose 
susceptible genius imitated her in every gesture and 
every motion ; and Clairon soon showed the effect of 
her ardent studies. She betrayed in the common inter- 
course of life, all the graces she had taught herself; 
she charmed her friends, and even softened her bar- 



DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 63 

barous mother ; in a word, the enthusiastic girl was an 
actress without knowing what an actress was. 

In this case of the youth of genius, are we to con- 
clude that the accidental view of a young actress prac- 
tising her studies imparted the character of Clairon ? 
Could a mere chance occurrence have given birth to 
those faculties which produced a sublime tragedian ? In 
all arts [there are talents which may be acquired by 
imitation and reflection, — and thus far may genius be 
educated ; but there are others which are entirely the 
result of native sensibility, which often secretly tor- 
ment the possessor, and which may even be lost from 
the want of development, dissolved into a state of lan- 
gour from which many have not recovered. Clairon, 
before she saw the young actress, and having yet no 
conception of a theatre, for she had never entered one, 
had in her soul that latent faculty which creates a dra- 
matic genius. " Had I not felt like Dido," she once 
exclaimed, " I could not have thus personified her !" 

The force of impressions received in the warm sus- 
ceptibility of the childhood of genius, is probably little 
known to us ; but we may perceive them also working 
in the moral character, which frequently discovers itself 
in childhood, and which manhood cannot always con- 
ceal, however it may alter. The intellectual and the 
moral character are unquestionably closely allied. 
Erasmus acquaints us, that Sir Thomas More had 
something ludicrous in his aspect, tending to a smile, — 
a feature which his portraits preserve ; and that he was 
more inclined to pleasantry and jesting, than to the 
gravity of the chancellor. This circumstance he im- 
putes to Sir Thomas More " being from a child so 



64 DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 

delighted with humour, that he seemed to be even born 
for it." And we know that he died as he had lived, 
with a jest on his lips. The hero, who came at length 
to regret that he had but one world to conquer, betrayed 
the majesty of his restless genius when but a youth. 
Had Aristotle been nigh, when, solicited to join in the 
course, the princely boy replied, that " He would run 
in no career where kings were not the competitors," 
the prescient tutor might have recognised in his pupil 
the future and successful rival of Darius and Porus. 

A narrative of the earliest years of Prince Henry, by 
one of his attendants, forms an authentic collection of 
juvenile anecdotes, which made [me feel very forcibly, 
that there are some children who deserve to have a 
biographer at their side ; but anecdotes of children are 
the rarest of biographies, and I deemed it a singular 
piece of good fortune to have recovered such a remark- 
able evidence of the precocity of character.* Professor 
Dugald Stewart has noticed a fact in Arnauld's infancy, 
which, considered in connexion with his subsequent 
life, affords a good illustration of the force of impres- 
sions received in the first dawn of reason. Arnauld, 
who, to his eightieth year, passed through a life of 
theological controversy, when a child, amusing himself 
in the library of the Cardinal Du Perron, requested 
to have a pen given to him: "For what purpose?" 
inquired the cardinal. " To write books, like you, 
against the Huguenots." The cardinal, then aged and 
infirm, could not conceal his joy at the prospect of so 
hopeful a successor ; and placing the pen in his hand, 

* I have preserved this manuscript narrative in " Curiosities of 
Literature." 



DECISIVE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 65 

said, " I give it you as the dying shepherd, Damsetas, 
bequeathed his pipe to the little Corydon." Other 
children might have asked for a pen — but to write 
against the Huguenots evinced a deeper feeling and a 
wider association of ideas, indicating the future polemic. 
Some of these facts, we conceive, afford decisive 
evidence of that instinct in genius, that primary quality 
of mind, sometimes called organization, which has in- 
flamed a war of words by an equivocal term. We 
repeat, that this faculty of genius can exist independent 
of education, and where it is wanting, education can 
never confer it : it is an impulse, an instinct always 
working in the character of " the chosen mind ; " 

" One with our feelings and our powers, 
And rather part of us, than ours." 

In the history of genius there are unquestionably many 
secondary causes of considerable influence in developing, 
or even crushing the germ — these have been of late 
often detected, and sometimes carried to a ridiculous 
extreme ; but among them none seem more remarkable 
than the first studies and the first habits. 



66 FIRST STUDIES INFLUENCE 



CHAPTER VI. 

The first studies. — The self-educated are marked by stubborn peculiar- 
ities. — Their errors. — Their improvement from the neglect or con- 
tempt they incur. — The history of self-education in Moses Mendel- 
sohn. — Friends usually prejudicial in the youth of genius. — A 
remarkable interview between Petrarch in his first studies, and his 
literary adviser. — Exhortation. 

The first studies form an epoch in the history of 
genius, and unquestionably have sensibly influenced its 
productions. Often have the first impressions stampec 
a character on the mind adapted to receive one, as the 
first step into life has often determined its walk. Bui 
this, for ourselves, is a far distant period in our exist- 
ence, which is lost in the horizon of our own recollec- 
tions, and is usually unobserved by others. 

Many of those peculiarities of men of genius which 
are not fortunate, and some which have hardened the 
character in its mould, may, however, be traced to this 
period. Physicians tell us that there is a certain point 
in youth at which the constitution is formed, and on 
which the sanity of life revolves; the character of 
genius experiences a similar dangerous period. Early 
bad tastes, early peculiar habits, early defective instruc- 
tions, all the egotistical pride of an untamed intellect, 
are those evil spirits which will dog genius to its grave. 
An early attachment to the works of Sir Thomas 
Browne produced in Johnson an excessive admiration 
of that Latinised English, which violated the native 



THE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 67 

graces of the Language ; and the peculiar style of 
Gibbon is traced by himself " to the constant habit of 
speaking one language, and writing another." The 
first studies of Rembrandt affected his after-labours. 
The peculiarity of shadow which marks all his pictures, 
originated in the circumstance of his father's mill re- 
ceiving light from an aperture at the top, which habitu- 
ated the artist afterwards to view all objects as if seen 
in that magical light. The intellectual Poussin, as 
Nicholas has been called could never from an early 
devotion to the fine statues of antiquity, extricate his 
genius on the canvass from the hard forms of marble : 
he sculptured with his pencil ; and that cold austerity 
of tone, still more remarkable in his last pictures, as it 
became mannered, chills the spectator on a first glance. 
When Pope was a child, he found in his mother's 
closet a small library of mystical devotion ; but it was 
not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the 
effusions of love and religion poured forth in his Eloisa, 
were caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic 
mystics, who to the last retained a place in his library 
among the classical bards of antiquity. The accidental 
perusal of Quintus Curtius first made Boyle, to use 
his own words, " in love with other than pedantic 
books, and conjured up in him an unsatisfied appetite 
of knowledge ; so that he thought he owed more to 
Quintus Curtius than did Alexander." From the 
perusal of Rycaut's folio of Turkish history in child- 
hood, the noble and impassioned bard of our times 
retained those indelible impressions which gave life and 
motion to the " Giaour," " the Corsair," and " Alp." 
A voyage to the country produced the scenery. Ryeaut 

f2 



68 FIRST STUDIES INFLUENCE 

only communicated the impulse to a mind susceptible 
of the poetical character ; and without this Turkish 
history we should still have had the poet.* 

The influence of first studies, in the formation of the 
character of genius, is a moral phenomenon, which has 
not sufficiently attracted our notice. Franklin ac- 
quaints us, that when young and wanting books, he 
accidentally found De Foe's u Essay on Projects," from 
which work impressions were derived which afterwards 
influenced some of the principal events of his life. The 
lectures of Reynolds probably originated in the essays 
of Richardson. It is acknowledged that these first 
made him a painter, and not long afterwards an author 
and it is said that many of the principles in his lectures 
may be traced in those first studies. Many were the 



* The following manuscript note, by Lord Byron on this passage, 
cannot fail to interest the lovers of poetry, as well as the inquirers into 
the history of the human mind. His lordship's recollections of his first 
readings will not alter the tendency of my conjecture; it only proves 
that he had read much more of Eastern history and manners than 
Rycaut's folio, which probably led to this class of books. 

" Knolles— Cantemir— De Tott— Lady M. W. Montagu— Haw- 
kins's translation from Mignot's History of the Turks — The Arabian 
Nights — All travels or histories or books upon the East I could meet 
with, I had read, as well as Rycaut, before I was ten years old. I 
think the Arabian Nights first. After these I preferred the history of 
naval actions, Don Quixote, and Smollett's novels, particularly Rode- 
rick Random, and I was passionate for the Roman History. 

" When a boy I could never bear to read any Poetry whatever with- 
out disgust and reluctance." — MS. note by Lord Byron. Latterly 
Lord Byron acknowledged in a conversation held in Greece with Count 
Gamba, not long before he died, " The Turkish History was one of 
the first books that gave me pleasure when a child ; and I believe it 
had much influence on my subsequent wishes to visit the Levant ; and 
gave perhaps the Oriental colouring which is observed in my poetry." 

I omitted the following note in the last Edition, but I shall now 
preserve it, as it may enter into the history of his Lordship's character. 

" When I was in Turkey I was oftener tempted to turn Mussulman 
than poet, and have often regretted since that I did not. 1818." 



THE CHARACTER OF GENIUS. 69 

indelible and glowing impressions caught by the ardent 
Reynolds from those bewildering pages of enthusiasm ! 
Sir Walter Rawleigh, according to a family tradition, 
when a young man, was perpetually reading and con- 
versing on the discoveries of Columbus, and the con- 
quests of Cortez and Pizarro. His character, as well as 
the great events of his life, seem to have been inspired 
by his favourite histories ; to pass beyond the discove- 
ries of the Spaniards became a passion, and the vision 
of his life. It is formally testified, that from a copy of 
Vegetius de Re Militari, in the school library of 
St. Paul's, Marlborough imbibed his passion for a 
military life. If he could not understand the text, the 
prints were, in such a mind, sufiicient to awaken the 
passion for military glory. Rousseau in early youth, 
full of his Plutarch, while he was also devouring the 
trash of romances, could only conceive human nature in 
the colossal forms, or be affected by the infirm sensibility 
of an imagination mastering all his faculties ; thinking 
like a Roman, and feeling like a Sybarite. The same 
circumstance happened to Catherine Macauley, who 
herself has told us how she owed the bent of her cha- 
racter to the early reading of the Roman historians ; but 
combining Roman admiration with English faction, she 
violated truth in English characters, and exaggerated 
romance in her Roman. But the permanent effect of a 
solitary bias in the youth of genius, impelling the whole 
current of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in the 
remarkable character of Archdeacon Blackburne, the 
author of the famous ' s Confessional," and the curious 
I Memoirs of Hollis," written with such a republican 
fierceness. 



70 OF SELF-EDUCATED GENIUS. 

I had long considered the character of our archdeacon 
as a lusus politicus et theologicus. Having subscribed to 
the Articles, and enjoying the archdeaconry, he was 
writing against subscription and the whole hierarchy, 
with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would 
have suspected that like Prynne and Bastwick, the 
archdeacon had already lost both his ears; while his 
antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a 
Roundhead of the Rota Club. The secret of these vol- 
canic explosions was only revealed in a letter acci- 
dentally preserved. In the youth of our spirited 
archdeacon, when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it 
happened at the house of a relation, that on a rainy day 
he fell, among other garret lumber, on some worm-eaten 
volumes which had once been the careful collections of 
his great-grandfather, an Oliverian justice. " These," 
says he, "I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there 
became acquainted with the manners and principles of 
many excellent old puritans, and then laid the founda- 
tion of my own." The enigma is now solved ! Arch- 
deacon Blackburne, in his seclusion in Yorkshire 
amidst the Oliverian justice's library, shows that we are 
in want of a Cervantes, but not of a Quixote, and 
Yorkshire might yet be as renowned a country as La 
Mancha ; for political romances, it is presumed, may be 
as fertile of ridicule as any of the folios of chivalry. 

We may thus mark the influence through life of 
those first unobserved impressions on the character of 
genius, which every author has not recorded. 

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, 
produces nothing on the side of genius. Where educa- 
tion ends genius often begins. Gray was asked if he 



OP SELF-EDUCATED GENIUS. 71 

recollected when he first felt the strong predilection to 
poetry ; he replied, that " he believed it was when he 
began to read Virgil for his own amusement, and not in 
school hours as a task." Such is the force of self-edu- 
cation in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, John 
Hunter, who was entirely self-educated, evinced such 
penetration in his anatomical discoveries, that he has 
brought into notice passages from writers he was unable 
to read, and which had been overlooked by profound 
scholars.* 

That the education of genius must be its own work, 
we may appeal to every one of the family. It is not 
always fortunate, for many die amidst a waste of talents 
and the wreck of mind. 

Many a sou] sublime 
Has felt the influence of malignant star. 

An unfavourable position in society is an usual 
obstruction in the course of this self-education ; and a 
man of genius, through half his life, has held a contest 
with a bad, or with no education. There is a race of 
the late-taught, who, with a capacity of leading in the 
first rank, are mortified to discover themselves only on 
a level with their contemporaries. Winkelman, who 
passed his youth in obscure misery as a village school- 
master, paints feelings which strikingly contrast with 
his avocations. " I formerly filled the office of a school- 
master with the greatest punctuality ; and I taught the 
A, B, C, to children with filthy heads, at the moment 
I was aspiring after the knowledge of the beautiful, and 
meditating, low to myself, on the similes of Homer ; 

* Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case is 
curiously illustrated. 



72 THE SELF-EDUCATED MARKED 

then I said to myself, as I still say, ' Peace, my soul, 
thy strength shall surmount thy cares.' " The obstruc- 
tions of so unhappy a self-education essentially injured 
his ardent genius, and long he secretly" sorrowed at this 
want of early patronage, and these habits of life so 
discordant with the habits of his mind. " I am unfortu- 
nately one of those whom the Greeks named oirifAaOeLs, 
sero sapientes, the late-learned, for I have appeared too 
late in the world and in Italy. To have done some- 
thing, it was necessary that I should have had an edu- 
cation analogous to my pursuits, and at your age." 
This class of the late-learned is a useful distinction. It 
is so with a sister-art ; one of the greatest musicians of 
our country assures me, that the ear is as latent with 
many ; there are the late-learned even in the musical 
world. Bud^us declared that he was both "self-taught 
and late-taught." 

The self-educated are marked by stubborn pecu- 
liarities. Often abounding with talent, but rarely with 
talent in its place, their native prodigality has to dread 
a plethora of genius and a delirium of wit ; or else, 
hard but irregular students rich in acquisition, they 
find how their huddled knowledge, like corn heaped in 
a granary, for want of ventilation and stirring, perishes 
in its own masses. Not having attended to the process 
of their own minds, and little acquainted with that of 
other men, they cannot throw out their intractable 
knowledge, nor with sympathy awaken by its softening 
touches the thoughts of others. To conduct their 
native impulse, which had all along driven them, is a 
secret not always discovered, or else discovered late in 
life. Hence it has happened with some of this race, 



BY STUBBORN PECULIARITIES. 73 

that their first work has not announced genius, and 
their last is stamped with it. Some are often judged 
by their first work, and when they have surpassed 
themselves, it is long ere it is acknowledged. They 
have improved themselves by the very neglect or even 
contempt which their unfortunate efforts were doomed 
to meet ; and when once they have learnt what is 
beautiful, they discover a living but unsuspected source 
in their own wild but unregarded originality. Glorying 
in their strength at the time that they are betraying 
their weakness, yet are they still mighty in that enthu- 
siasm which is only disciplined by its own fierce habits. 
Never can the native faculty of genius with its creative 
warmth be crushed out of the human soul ; it will work 
itself out beneath the encumbrance of the most uncul- 
tivated minds, even amidst the deep perplexed feelings 
and the tumultuous thoughts of the most visionary 
enthusiast, who is often only a man of genius mis- 
placed.* We may find a whole race of these self- 
taught among the unknown writers of the old romances, 
and the ancient ballads of European nations ; there 
sleep many a Homer and Virgil — legitimate heirs of 
their genius though possessors of decayed estates. Bun- 
yan is the Spenser of the people. The fire burned 
towards Heaven, although the altar was rude and 
rustic. 

Barry, the painter, has left behind him works not 

* " One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own 
experience, that there exist folios on the 'human understanding and 
the nature of man which would have a far juster claim to their high 
rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found 
as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple 
page of George Fox and Jacob Behmen." Mr. Coleridge's Biographic 
Literaria, i. 143. 



74 HISTORY OF SELF-EDUCATION 

to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, nor the 
artist who dares not be just. That enthusiast, with a 
temper of mind resembling Rousseau's, but with 
coarser feelings, was the same creature of untamed 
imagination consumed by the same passions, with the 
same fine intellect disordered, and the same fortitude of 
soul ; but he found his self-taught pen, like his pencil, 
betray his genius. A vehement enthusiasm breaks 
through his ill-composed works, throwing the sparks of 
his bold conceptions into the soul of the youth of genius. 
When, in his character of professor, he delivered his 
lectures at the academy, at every pause his auditors 
rose in a tumult, and. at every close their hands re- 
turned to him the proud feelings he adored. This gifted 
but self-educated man, once listening to the children of 
genius whom he had created about him, exclaimed, 
" Go it, go it, my boys ! they did so at Athens." This 
self-formed genius could throw up his native mud into 
the very heaven of his invention ! 

But even such pages as those of Barry's are the ali- 
ment of young genius. Before we can discern the 
beautiful, must we not be endowed with the suscepti- 
bility of love ? Must not the disposition be formed 
before even the object appears ? I have witnessed the 
young artist of genius glow and start over the reveries 
of the uneducated Barry, but pause and meditate, and 
inquire over the mature elegance of Reynolds ; in the 
one, he caught the passion for beauty, and in the other, 
he discovered the beautiful ; with the one he was warm 
and restless, and with the other calm and satisfied. 

Of the difficulties overcome in the self-education of 
genius, we have a remarkable instance in the character 



IN MOSES MENDELSOHN. 75 

of Moses Mendelsohn, on whom literary Germany 
has bestowed the honourable title of the Jewish 
Socrates.* So great apparently were the invincible 
obstructions which barred out Mendelsohn from the 
world of literature and philosophy, that, in the history 
of men of genius, it is something like taking in the 
history of man, the savage of Aveyron from his woods, 
— who, destitute of a human language, should at length 
create a model of eloquence ; who, without the faculty 
of conceiving a figure, should at length be capable of 
adding to the demonstrations of Euclid; and who, 
without a complex idea and with few sensations, should 
at length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics, open 
to the world a new view of the immortality of the 
soul ! 

Mendelsohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village 
in Germany, received an education completely rabbini- 
cal, and its nature must be comprehended, or the term 
of education would be misunderstood. The Israelites in 
Poland and Germany live with all the restrictions of 
their ceremonial law in an insulated state, and are not 
always instructed in the language of the country of 
their birth. They employ for their common intercourse 
a barbarous or patois Hebrew ; while the sole studies 
of the young rabbins are strictly confined to the Talmud, 
of which the fundamental principle, like the Sonna of 

* I composed the life of Mendelsohn so far back as in 1798, in a 
periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their 
notices ; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention 
of the late Barry, then not personally known to me ; and he gave all 
the immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, 
by immediately placing in his Elysium of Genius, Mendelsohn shaking 
hands with Addison, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, 
and near Locke, the English master of Mendelsohn's mind. 



76 HISTORY OF SELF-EDUCATION 

the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of pro- 
fane learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls 
in the understanding and the faith of man, was to shut 
out what the imitative Catholics afterwards called 
heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of the Tal- 
mud which the true Hebraic student contemplates 
through all the seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their 
low valley imagine their surrounding mountains to be 
the confines of the universe. 

Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelsohn's 
first studies ; but even in his boyhood this conflict of 
study occasioned an agitation of his spirits, which 
affected his life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical 
dreamers, he caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated 
Maimonides ; and his native sagacity was already clear- 
ing up the surrounding darkness. An enemy not less 
hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous 
legends, presented itself in the indigence of his father, 
who was compelled to send away the youth on foot to 
Berlin, to find labour and bread. 

At Berlin, Mendelsohn becomes an amanuensis to 
another poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him 
into the theology, the jurisprudence, and the scholastic 
philosophy of his people. Thus, he was as yet no 
farther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in 
which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and 
Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature which was 
finally to place him among the first polished critics of 
Germany. 

Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first 
great impulse to the mind of genius. Mendelsohn 
received this from the companion of his misery and his 



IN MOSES MENDELSOHN. 77 

studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers. He 
was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the 
orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a 
vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude. But this 
vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a 
mathematician. Mendelsohn, at a distant day, never 
alluded to him without tears. Thrown together into 
the same situation, they approached each other by the 
same sympathies, and communicating in the only lan- 
guage which Mendelsohn could speak, the Polander 
voluntarily undertook his literary education. 

Then was seen one of the most extraordinary specta- 
cles in the history of modern literature. Two house- 
less Hebrew youths might be discovered, in the moonlit 
streets of Berlin, sitting in retired corners, or on the 
steps of some porch, the one instructing the other, with 
an Euclid in his hand ; but what is more extraordinary, 
it was a Hebrew version, composed by the master for 
a pupil who knew no other language. Who could then 
have imagined that the future Plato of Germany was 
sitting on those steps ! 

The Polander, whose deep melancholy had settled on 
his heart, died — yet he had not lived in vain, since the 
electric spark that lighted up the soul of Mendelsohn 
had fallen from his own. 

Mendelsohn was now left alone ; his mind teeming 
with its chaos, and still master of no other language 
than that barren idiom which was incapable of express- 
ing the ideas he was meditating on. He had scarcely 
made a step into the philosophy of his age, and the 
genius of Mendelsohn had probably been lost to 
Germany, had not the singularity of his studies and the 



78 HISTORY OF SELF-EDUCATION 

cast of his mind been detected by the sagacity of Dr. 
Kisch. The aid of this physician was momentous; for 
he devoted several hours every day to the instruction of 
a poor youth, whose strong capacity he had the discern- 
ment to perceive, and the generous temper to aid. 
Mendelsohn was soon enabled to read Locke in a Latin 
version ; but with such extreme pain, that, compelled 
to search for every word, and to arrange their Latin 
order, and at the same time to combine metaphysical 
ideas, it was observed that he did not so much translate, 
as guess by the force of meditation. 

This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded his 
progress, but invigorated his habit, as the racer, by run- 
ning against the hill, at length courses with facility. 

A succeeding effort was to master the living lan- 
guages, and chiefly the English, that he might read his 
favourite Locke in his own idiom. Thus a great genius 
for metaphysics and languages was forming itself alone, 
without aid. 

It is curious to detect, in the character of genius, the 
effects of local and moral influences. There resulted 
from Mendelsohn's early situation, certain defects in 
his Jewish education, and numerous impediments in his 
studies. Inheriting but one language, too obsolete and 
naked to serve the purposes of modern philosophy, he 
perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions, and in his de- 
light of knowing many languages, he with difficulty 
escaped from remaining a mere philologist ; while in 
his philosophy, having adopted the prevailing principles 
of Wolf and Baumgarten, his genius was long without 
the courage or the skill to emancipate itself from their 
rusty chains. It was more than a step which had 



IN MOSES MENDELSOHN. 79 

brought him into their circle, but a step was yet want- 
ing to escape from it. 

At length the mind of Mendelsohn enlarged in 
literary intercourse : he became a great and original 
thinker in many beautiful speculations in moral and 
critical philosophy ; while he had gradually been 
creating a style which the critics of Germany have 
declared to be their first luminous model of precision and 
elegance. Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in 
the voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his 
middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, and in 
his mature life wrestling with that commercial station 
whence he derived his humble independence, became 
one of the master-writers in the literature of his 
country. The history of the mind of Mendelsohn 
is one of the noblest pictures of the self-education of 
genius. 

Friends, whose prudential counsels in the business of 
life are valuable in our youth, are usually prejudicial in 
the youth of genius. The multitude of authors and 
artists originates in the ignorant admiration of their 
early friends ; while the real genius has often been dis- 
concerted and thrown into despair, by the false judg- 
ments of his domestic circle. The productions of taste 
are more unfortunate than those which depend on a 
chain of reasoning, or the detail of facts ; these are more 
palpable to the common judgments of men ; but taste is 
of such rarity, that a long life may be passed by some 
without once obtaining a familiar acquaintance with a 
mind so cultivated by knowledge, so tried by expe- 
rience, and so practised by converse with the literary 
world, that its prophetic feeling can anticipate the public 



80 FRIENDS USUALLY PREJUDICIAL 

opinion. When a young writer s first essay is shown, 
some through mere inability of censure, see nothing but 
beauties ; others, from mere imbecility, can see none ; 
and others, out of pure malice, see nothing but faults 
Ci I was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, " with the 
modest practice of reading the manuscript to my friends 
Of such friends some will praise for politeness, and some 
will criticise for vanity." Had several of our first 
writers set their fortunes on the cast of their friends' opi- 
nions, we might have lost some precious compositions. 
The friends of Thomson discovered nothing but faults in 
his early productions, one of which happened to be his 
noblest, the "Winter;" they just could discern that 
these abounded with luxuriances, without being aware 
that they were the luxuriances of a poet. He ha> 
created a new school in art — and appealed from hi 
circle to the public. From a manuscript letter of ou 
poet's, written when employed on his " Summer," 
transcribe his sentiments on his former literary friends 
in Scotland — he is writing to Mallet : " Far from 
defending these two lines, I damn them to the lowest 
depth of the poetical Tophet, prepared of old, for 
Mitchell, Morrice, Rook, Cook, Beckingham, and a 
long &c. Wherever I have evidence, or think I have 
evidence, which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as 
all the mules in Persia." This poet of warm affections 
felt so irritably the perverse criticisms of his learned 
friends, that they were to share alike, a poetic Hell — 
probably a sort of Dunciad, or Lampoons. One of 
these "blasts" broke out in a vindictive epigram on 
Mitchell, whom he describes with a " blasted eye ;" but 
this critic literally having one, the poet, to avoid a per- 



IN THE YOUTH OF GENIUS. 81 

sonal reflection, could only consent to make the blemish 
more active — 

" Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell ! why 
Appears one beauty to thy blasting eye?" 

He again calls him " the planet-blasted Mitchell." 
Of another of these critical friends he speaks with more 
sedateness, but with a strong conviction that the critic, 
a very sensible man, had no sympathy with the poet. 
" Aikman s reflections on my writings are very good, 
but he does not in them regard the turn of my genius 
enough ; should I alter my way, I would write poorly. 
I must choose what appears to me the most significant 
epithet, or I cannot, with any heart, proceed." The 
" Mirror," when periodically published in Edinburgh, 
was "fastidiously" received, as all " home-productions" 
are ; but London avenged the cause of the author. 
When Swift introduced Parnell to Lord Bolingbroke, 
and to the world, he observes, in his Journal, "it is 
pleasant to see one who hardly passed for anything in 
Ireland, make his way here with a little friendly for- 
warding." Montaigne has honestly told us, that in 
his own province, they considered that for him to 
attempt to become an author was perfectly ludicrous : 
at home, says he, " I am compelled to purchase printers ; 
while at a distance, printers purchase me." There is 
nothing more trying to the judgment of the friends of a 
young man of genius, than the invention of a new 
manner : without a standard to appeal to, without 
bladders to swim, the ordinary critic sinks into irre- 
trievable distress ; but usually pronounces against 
novelty. "When Reynolds returned from Italy, warm 
with all the excellence of his art, and painted a por- 



82 ADVICE, ITS ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. 

trait, his old master Hudson viewing it, and perceiving 
no trace of his own manner, exclaimed that he did not 
paint so well as when he left England ; while another, 
who conceived no higher excellence than Kneller, 
treated with signal contempt the future Raphael of 
England. 

If it be dangerous for a young writer to resign him- 
self to the opinions of his friends, he also incurs some 
peril in passing them with inattention. He wants a 
Quintilian. One mode to obtain such an invaluable 
critic, is the cultivation of his own judgment in a round 
of reading and meditation. Let him at once supply 
the marble and be himself the sculptor : let the great 
authors of the world be his gospels, and the best critics 
their expounders ; from the one he will draw inspira- 
tion, and from the others he will supply those tardy 
discoveries in art, which he who solely depends on his 
own experience may obtain too late. Those who do 
not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised; 
their progress is like those who travel without a map of 
the country. The more extensive an author's know- 
ledge of what has been done, the greater will be his 
powers in knowing what to do. To obtain originality, 
and effect discovery, sometimes requires but a single 
step, if we only know from what point to set forwards. 
This important event in the life of genius has too often 
depended on chance and good fortune, and many have 
gone down to their graves without having discovered 
their unsuspected talent. Curran's predominant fa- 
culty was an exuberance of imagination when excited 
by passion ; but when young he gave no evidence of 
this peculiar faculty, nor for several years, while a 



EARLY PRODUCTIONS OF GENIUS. 83 

candidate for public distinction was he aware of his 
particular powers ; so slowly his imagination had deve- 
loped itself. It was, when assured of the secret of his 
strength, that his confidence, his ambition, and his 
industry were excited. 

Let the youth preserve his juvenile compositions, 
whatever these may be ; they are the spontaneous 
growth, and like the plants of the Alps not always 
found in other soils ; they are his virgin fancies. By 
contemplating them he may detect some of his predo- 
minant habits, — resume a former manner more happily, 
— invent novelty from an old subject he had rudely 
designed, — and often may steal from himself some in- 
ventive touches, which, thrown into his most finished 
compositions, may seem a happiness rather than an art. 
It was in contemplating on some of their earliest and 
unfinished productions, that more than one artist dis- 
covered with West, that " there were inventive touches 
of art in his first and juvenile essay, which, with all his 
subsequent knowledge and experience, he had not been 
able to surpass." A young writer in the progress of 
his studies, should often recollect a fanciful simile of 
Dryden : 

" As those who unripe veins in mines explore, 

On the rich hed again the warm turf lay, 
Till time digests the yet imperfect ore ; 

And know it will be gold another day." 

The youth of genius is that " age of admiration" as 
sings the poet of "Human Life," when the spell breathed 
into our ear by our genius, fortunate or unfortunate, is 
— "Aspire!" Then we adore art, and the artists. It 
was Richardson's enthusiasm which gave Reynolds 
the raptures he caught in meditating on the description 
g 2 



84 REMARKABLE INTERVIEW BETWEEN 

of a great painter ; and Reynolds thought Raphael 
the most extraordinary man the world had ever pro- 
duced. West, when a youth, exclaimed, that " A 
painter is a companion for kings and emperors ! " This 
was the feeling which rendered the thoughts of obscurity 
painful and insupportable to their young minds. 

But this sunshine of rapture is not always spread 
over the spring of the youthful year. There is a season 
of self-contest, a period of tremors, and doubts, and 
darkness. These frequent returns of melancholy, some- 
times of despondence, which is the lot of ^inexperienced 
genius, is a secret history of the heart, which has been 
finely conveyed to us by Petrarch, in a conversation 
with John of Florence, to whom the young poet often 
resorted when dejected, to reanimate his failing powers, 
to confess his faults, and to confide to him his dark and 
wavering resolves. It was a question with Petrarch, 
whether he should not turn away from the pursuit of 
literary fame, by giving another direction to his life. 

" I went one day to John of Florence in one of those 
ague-fits of faint-heartedness which often happened to 
me : he received me with his accustomed kindness. 
' What ails you ? ' said he, ' you seem oppressed with 
thought : if I am not deceived, something has hap- 
pened to you.' — 6 You do not deceive yourself, my father 
(for thus I used to call him), and yet nothing newly 
has happened to me ; but I come to confide to you that 
my old melancholy torments me more than usual. You 
know its nature, for my heart has always been opened 
to you ; you know all which I have done to draw my- 
self out of the crowd, and to acquire a name ; and 
surely not without some success, since I have your 



PETRARCH AND JOHN OP FLORENCE. 85 

testimony in my favour. Are you not the truest man, 
and the best of critics, who have never ceased to bestow- 
on me your praise, — and what need I more ? Have you 
not often told me that I am answerable to God for the 
talents he has endowed me with, if I neglected to cul- 
tivate them ? Your praises were to me as a sharp spur : 
I applied myself to study with more ardour, insatiable 
even of my moments. Disdaining the beaten paths, I 
opened a new road ; and I flattered myself that assidu- 
ous labour would lead to something great ; but I know 
not how, when I thought myself highest, I feel myself 
fallen ; the spring of my mind has dried up ; what 
seemed easy once, now appears to me above my strength; 
I stumble at every step, and am ready to sink for ever 
into despair. I return to you to teach me, or at least 
advise me. Shall I for ever quit my studies ? Shall 
I strike into some new course of life ? My father, have 
pity on me ! draw me out of the frightful state in which 
I am lost.' I could proceed no further without shed- 
ding tears. i Cease to afflict yourself, my son,' said 
that good man ; c your condition is not so bad as you 
think : the truth is, you knew little at the time you 
imagined you knew much. The discovery of your 
ignorance is the first great step you have made towards 
true knowledge. The veil is lifted up, and you now 
view those deep shades of the soul which were con- 
cealed from you by excessive presumption. In ascend- 
ing an elevated spot, we gradually discover many things 
whose existence before was not suspected by us. Per- 
severe in the career which you entered with my advice ; 
feel confident that God will not abandon you : there 
are maladies which the patient does not perceive ; but 



86 EXHORTATION. 

to be aware of the disease, is the first step towards the 
cure.' " 

This remarkable literary interview is here given, that 
it may perchance meet the eye of some kindred youth 
at one of those lonely moments when a Shakspeare may 
have thought himself no poet, and a Raphael believed 
himself no painter. Then may the tender wisdom of a 
John of Florence, in the cloudy despondency of art, 
lighten up the vision of its glory ! 

Ingenuous Youth ! if* in a constant perusal of the 
master-writers, you see your own sentiments antici- 
pated, if in the tumult of your mind, as it comes in 
contact with theirs, new sentiments arise ; if, sometimes, 
looking on the public favourite of the hour, you feel 
that within which prompts you to imagine that you 
could rival or surpass him ; if, in meditating on the 
confessions of every man of genius, for they all have 
their confessions, you find you have experienced the 
same sensations from the same circumstances, encoun- 
tered the same difficulties and overcome them by the 
same means, — then let not your courage be lost in your 
admiration, — but listen to that " still small voice " in 
your heart which cries with Coreggio and with Mon- 
tesquieu, " Ed io anche son pittore ! " 



IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 87 



CHAPTER VII. 

Of the irritability of genius. — Genius in society often in a state of 
suffering. — Equality of temper more prevalent among men of letters. 
— Of the occupation of making a great name. — Anxieties of the most 
successful. — Of the inventors. — Writers of learning. — Writers of 
taste. — Artists. 

The modes of life of a man of genius, often tinctured 
by eccentricity and enthusiasm, maintain an eternal 
conflict with the monotonous and imitative habits of 
society, as society is carried on in a great metropolis, 
where men are necessarily alike, and where in perpetual 
intercourse, they shape themselves to one another. 

The occupations, the amusements, and the ardour of 
the man of genius, are at discord with the artificial 
habits of life : in the vortexes of business or the world 
of pleasure, crowds of human beings are only treading 
in one another's steps. The pleasures and the sorrows 
of this active multitude are not his, while his are 
not obvious to them ; and his favourite occupations 
strengthen his peculiarities and increase his sensibility. 
Genius in society is often in a state of suffering. Pro- 
fessional characters, who are themselves so often literary, 
yielding to their predominant interests, conform to that 
assumed urbanity which levels them with ordinary 
minds; but the man of genius cannot leave himself 
behind in the cabinet he quits ; the train of his thoughts 
is not stopped at will, and in the range of conversation 
the habits of his mind will prevail : the poet will some- 



88 GENIUS IN SOCIETY OFTEN 

times muse till he modulates a verse ; the artist is 
sketching what a moment presents, and a moment 
changes; the philosophical historian is suddenly ab- 
sorbed by a new combination of thought, and, placing 
his hands over his eyes, is thrown back into the middle 
ages. Thus it happens that an excited imagination, a 
high-toned feeling, a wandering reverie, a restlessness of 
temper, are perpetually carrying the man of genius out 
of the processional line of the mere conversationists. 
Like all solitary beings, he is much too sentient, and 
prepares for defence even at a 'random touch or a chance 
hit. His generalising views take things only in masses, 
while in his rapid emotions he interrogates, and doubts, 
and is caustic ; in a word, he thinks he converses, while 
he is at his studies. Sometimes, apparently a complacent 
listener, we are mortified by detecting the absent man : 
now he appears humbled and spiritless, ruminating over 
some failure which probably may be only known to 
himself, and now haughty and hardy for a triumph he 
has obtained, which yet remains a secret to the world. 
No man is so apt to indulge the extremes of the most 
opposite feelings : he is sometimes insolent, and some- 
times querulous ; now the soul of tenderness and tran- 
quillity, view him stung by jealousy, or writhing in 
aversion ! A fever shakes his spirit ; a fever which 
has sometimes generated a disease, and has even pro- 
duced a slight perturbation of the faculties.* In one 

* I have given a history of literary quarrels from personal mo- 
tives, in Quarrels of Authors, Vol. III. p. 285. There we find how 
many controversies, in which the public get involved, have sprung 
from some sudden squabble, some neglect of petty civility, some un- 
lucky epithet, or some casual observation dropped without much con- 
sideration, which mortified or enraged the genus irritabile ; a title 



IN A STATE OF SUFFERING. 89 

of those manuscript notes by Lord Byron on this work, 
which I have wished to preserve, I find his lordship 
observing on the feelings of genius, that " the depre- 
ciation of the lowest of mankind is more painful than 
the applause of the highest is pleasing." Such is the 
confession of genius, and such its liability to hourly 
pain. 

Once we were nearly receiving from the hand of 
genius the most curious sketches of the temper, the 
irascible humours, the delicacy of soul, even to its 
shadowiness, from the warm sbozzos of Burns when he 
began a diary of the heart, — a narrative of characters 
and events, and a chronology of his emotions. It was 
natural for such a creature of sensation and passion to 
project such a regular task, but quite impossible for 
him to get through it. The paper book, that he con- 
ceived would have recorded all these things, turns out, 
therefore, but a very imperfect document. Imperfect 
as it was, it has been thought proper not to give it 
entire. Yet there we view a warm "original mind, 
when he first stepped into the polished circles of society, 
discovering that he could no longer " pour out his 
bosom, his every thought and floating fancy, his very 
inmost soul, with unreserved confidence to another, 



which from ancient days has heen assigned to every description of 
authors. The late Dr. Wells, who had some experience in his inter- 
course with many literary characters, observed, that " In whatever 
regards the fruits of their mental labours, this is universally acknow- 
ledged to be true. Some of the malevolent passions indeed frequently 
become in learned men more than ordinarily strong, from want of that 
restraint upon their excitement which society imposes." A puerile 
critic has reproached me for having drawn my description entirely from 
my own fancy: — I have taken it from life! See further symptoms of 
this disease at the close of the chapter on Self-praise in the present work. 



90 GENIUS IN SOCIETY OFTEN 

without hazard of losing part of that respect which man 
deserves from man ; or, from the unavoidable imper- 
fections attending human nature, of one day repenting 
his confidence." This was the first lesson he learnt at 
Edinburgh, and it was as a substitute for such a human 
being, that he bought a paper-book to keep under lock 
and key : "a security at least equal/' says he, " to the 
bosom of any friend whatever." Let the man of genius 
pause over the fragments of this " paper book ; " it will 
instruct as much as any open confession of a criminal 
at the moment he is about to suffer. No man was more 
afflicted with that miserable pride, the infirmity of men 
of imagination, which is so jealously alive, even among 
their best friends, as to exact a perpetual acknowledg- 
ment of their powers. Our poet, with all his gratitude 
and veneration for "the noble Glencairn," was "wounded 
to the soul" because his lordship showed " so much 
attention, engrossing attention, to the only blockhead 
at table ; the whole company consisted of his lordship, 
Dunderpate, and myself." This Dunderpate, who 
dined with Lord Glencairn, might have been a useful 
citizen ; who, in some points, is of more value than an 
irritable bard. Burns was equally offended with 
another patron, who was also a literary brother, Dr. 
Blair. At the moment he too appeared to be neglect- 
ing the irritable poet — " for the mere carcass of great- 
ness — or when his eye measured the difference of their 
point of elevation ; I say to myself, with scarcely any 
emotion," (he might have added, except a good deal of 
painful contempt,) " what do I care for him or his 
pomp either?" — "Dr. Blair's vanity is proverbially 
known among his acquaintance," adds Burns, at the 



IN A STATE OF SUFFERING. 91 

moment that the solitary haughtiness of his own genins 
had entirely escaped his self-observation. 

This character of genius is not singular. Grimm 
tells of Marivaux, that though a good man, there 
was something dark and suspicious in his character, 
which made it difficult to keep on terms with him • the 
most innocent word would wound him, and he was 
always inclined to think that there was an intention to 
mortify him ; this disposition made him unhappy, and 
rendered his acquaintance too painful to endure. 

What a moral paradox, but what an unquestionable 
fact, is the wayward irritability of some of the finest 
geniuses, which is often weak to effeminacy, and capri- 
cious to childishness ! while minds of a less delicate 
texture are not frayed and fretted by casual frictions ; 
and plain sense with a coarser grain, is sufficient to 
keep down these aberrations of their feelings. How 
mortifying is the list of — 

" Fears of the brave and follies of the -wise !" 

Many have been sore and implacable on an allusion 
to some personal defect — on the obscurity of their birth 
— on some peculiarity of habit ; and have suffered 
themselves to be governed in life by nervous whims and 
chimeras, equally fantastic and trivial. This morbid 
sensibility lurks in the temperament of genius, and the 
infection is often discovered where it is not always 
suspected. Cumberland declared that the sensibility 
of some men of genius is so quick and captious, that 
you must first consider whom they can be happy with, 
before you can promise yourself any happiness with 
them : if you bring uncongenial humours into contact 



92 MORBID INSENSIBILITY OF GENIUS, 

with each other, all the objects of society will be frus- 
trated by inattention to the proper grouping of the 
guests. Look round on our contemporaries ; every day 
furnishes facts which confirm our principle. Among 
the vexations of Pope was the libel of " the pictured 
shape;" and even the robust mind of Johnson could 
not suffer to be exhibited as " blinking Sam." Milton 
must have delighted in contemplating his own person ; 
and the engraver not having reached our sublime bard's 
ideal grace, he has pointed his indignation in four 
iambics. The praise of a skipping ape raised the feel- 
ing of envy in that child of nature and genius, Gold- 
smith, Yoiture, the son of a vintner, like our Prior, 
was so mortified whenever reminded of his original 
occupation, that it was bitterly said, that wine, which 
cheered the hearts of all men, sickened the heart of 
Yoiture. Akenside ever considered his lameness as 
an unsupportable misfortune, for it continually reminded 
him of the fall of the cleaver from one of his father's 
blocks. Beccaria invited to Paris by the literati, 
arrived melancholy and silent — and abruptly returned 
home. At that moment this great man was most 
miserable from a fit of jealousy : a young female had 
extinguished all his philosophy. The poet Rousseau 
was the son of a cobbler ; and when his honest parent 
waited at the door of the theatre to embrace his son on 
the success of his first piece, genius, whose sensibility is 
not always virtuous, repulsed the venerable father with 
insult and contempt. But I will no longer proceed 
from folly to crime ! 

Those who give so many sensations to others must 
themselves possess an excess and a variety of feelings. 



ARISING FROM A VARIETY OF FEELINGS. 93 

We find, indeed, that they are censured for their 
extreme irritability ; and that happy equality of temper 
so prevalent among men of letters, and which is 
conveniently acquired by men of the world, has been 
usually refused to great mental powers, or to fervid 
dispositions — authors and artists. The man of wit 
becomes petulant, the profound thinker morose, and the 
vivacious ridiculously thoughtless. 

"When Rousseau once retired to a village, he had to 
learn to endure its conversation ; for this purpose he was 
compelled to invent an expedient to get rid of his uneasy 
sensations. " Alone, I have never known ennui, even 
when perfectly unoccupied ; my imagination, filling the 
void, was sufficient to busy me. It is only the inactive 
chit-chat of the room, when every one is seated face to 
face, and only moving their tongues, which I never 
could support. There to be a fixture, nailed with one 
hand on the other, to settle the state of the weather, or 
watch the flies about one, or, what is worse, to be ban- 
dying compliments, this to me is not bearable." He 
hit on the expedient of making lace-strings, carrying his 
working cushion in his visits, to keep the peace with the 
country gossips. 

Is the occupation of making a great name less 
anxious and precarious than that of making a great for- 
tune ? the progress of a man s capital is unequivocal to 
him, but that of the fame of authors and artists is for the 
greater part of their lives of an ambiguous nature. 
They become whatever the minds or knowledge of others 
make them ; they are the creatures of the prejudices 
and the predispositions of others, and must suffer from 
those precipitate judgments which are the result of 



94 ANXIETIES OF THE 

such prejudices and such predispositions. Time only is 
the certain friend of literary worth, for time makes the 
world disagree among themselves ; and when those who 
condemn discover that there are others who approve, 
the weaker party loses itself in the stronger, and at 
length they learn, that the author was far more reason- 
able than their prejudices had allowed them to conceive. 
It is thus, however, that the regard which men of 
genius find in one place they lose in another. We may 
often smile at the local gradations of genius ; the fervid 
esteem in which an author is held here, and the cold 
indifference, if not contempt, he encounters in another 
place : here the man of learning is condemned as a heavy 
drone, and there the man of wit annoys the unwitty 
listener. 

And are not the anxieties of even the most successful 
men of genius renewed at every work — often quitted in 
despair, often returned to with rapture ? the same agi- 
tation of the spirits, the same poignant delight, the same 
weariness, the same dissatisfaction, the same querulous 
languishment after excellence ? Is the man of genius 
an inventor ? the discovery is contested, or it is not 
comprehended for ten years after, perhaps not during 
his whole life; even men of science are as children 
before him. Sir Thomas Bodley wrote to Lord Bacon, 
remonstrating with him on his new mode of philoso- 
vhising. It seems the fate of all originality of thinking 
to be immediately opposed ; a contemporary is not pre- 
pared for its comprehension, and too often cautiously 
avoids it, from the prudential motive which turns away 
from a new and solitary path. Bacon was not at all 
understood at home in his own day; his reputation — 






MOST SUCCESSFUL GENIUS. 95 

for it was not celebrity — was confined to his history of 
Henry VII., and his Essays; it was long after his 
death before English writers ventured to quote Bacon 
as an authority ; and with equal simplicity and gran- 
deur, Bacon called himself, "the servant of Posterity." 
Montesquieu gave his Esprit des Loix to be read by 
that man in France, whom he conceived to be the best 
judge, and in return received the most mortifying 
remarks. The great philosopher exclaimed in despair, 
" I see my own age is not ripe enough to understand my 
work ; however, it shall be published !" When Kepler 
published the first rational work on comets, it was 
condemned, even by the learned, as a wild dream. 
Copernicus so much dreaded the prejudice of mankind 
against his treatise on "The Revolutions of the Heavenly 
Bodies," that, by a species of continence of all others 
most difficult to a philosopher, says Adam Smith, he 
detained it in his closet for thirty years together. 
Linnaeus once in despair abandoned his beloved studies, 
from a too irritable feeling of the ridicule in which, as it 
appeared to him, a professor Siegesbeck had involved 
his famous system. Penury, neglect, and labour, 
Linn^us could endure, but that his botany should 
become the object of ridicule for all Stockholm, shook 
the nerves of this great inventor in his science. Let 
him speak for himself. " No one cared how many 
sleepless nights and toilsome hours I had passed, while 
all with one voice declared, that Siegesbeck had annihi- 
lated me. I took my leave of Flora, who bestows 
nothing on me but Siegesbecks ; and condemned my too 
numerous observations a thousand times over to eternal 
oblivion. What a fool have I been to waste so much 



96 ANXIETIES OF THE 

time, to spend my days and nights in a study which 
yields no better fruit, and makes me the laughing-stock 
of the world !" Such are the cries of the irritability of 
genius, and such are often the causes. The world was 
in danger of losing a new science, had not Linn,eus 
returned to the discoveries which he had forsaken in the 
madness of the mind ! The great Sydenham, who like 
our Harvey and our Hunter, effected a revolution in 
the science of medicine, and led on alone by the inde- 
pendence of his genius attacked the most prevailing pre- 
judices, so highly provoked the malignant emulation of 
his rivals, that a conspiracy was raised against the father 
of our modern practice to banish him out of the college, 
as " guilty of medical heresy." John Hunter was 
great discoverer in his own science ; but one who well 
knew him has told us, that few of his contemporaries 
perceived the ultimate object of his pursuits ; and his 
strong and solitary genius laboured to perfect his de- 
signs without the solace of sympathy, without one 
cheering approbation. " We bees do not provide 
honey for ourselves," exclaimed Van Helmont, when 
worn out by the toils of chemistry, and still contem- 
plating, amidst tribulation and persecution, and ap- 
proaching death, his " Tree of Life," which he imagined 
he had discovered in the cedar. But with a sublime 
melancholy, his spirit breaks out : " My mind breathes 
some unheard-of thing within ; though I, as unprofit- 
able for this life, shall be buried !" Such were the 
mighty but indistinct anticipations of this visionary 
inventor, the father of modern chemistry ! 

I cannot quit this short record of the fates of the 
inventors in science, without adverting to another cause 









MOST SUCCESSFUL GENIUS. 97 

of that irritability of genius which is so closely con- 
nected with their pursuits. If we look into the history 
of theories, we shall be surprised at the vast number 
which have " not left a rack behind." And do we sup- 
pose that the inventors themselves were not at times 
alarmed by secret doubts of their soundness and sta- 
bility ? They felt, too often for their repose, that the 
noble architecture which they had raised might be built 
on moveable sands, and be found only in the dust of 
libraries ; a cloudy day, or a fit of indigestion, would 
deprive an inventor of his theory all at once, and as 
one of them said, " after dinner, all that I have written 
in the morning appears to me dark, incongruous, non- 
sensical." At such moments we should find this man 
of genius in no pleasant mood. The true cause of this 
nervous state cannot, nay, must not, be confided to the 
world : the honour of his darling theory will always be 
dearer to his pride than the confession of even slight 
doubts which may shake its truth. It is a curious fact 
which we have but recently discovered, that Rousseau 
was disturbed by a terror he experienced, and which 
we well know was not Unfounded, that his theories of 
education were false and absurd. He could not endure 
to read a page in his own Emile* without disgust after 
the work had been published ! He acknowledged that 
there were more suffrages against his notions than for 
them. " I am not displeased," says he, " with myself 
on the style and eloquence, but I still dread that my 
writings are good for nothing at the bottom, and that 
all my theories are full of extravagance. — Je crains 

* In a letter by Hume to Blair, written in 1766, apparently first 
miblished in the Literary Gazette, Nov. 17, 1821. 

H 



98 ANXIETIES OF THE 

toujour s que je pkche par le fond, et que tous mes $i/s~ 
terries ne sont que des extravagances." Hartley with 
his " Vibrations and vibratiuncules," Leibnitz with 
his " Monads," Cudworth with his " Plastic Natures," 
Malebranche with his paradoxical doctrine of u Seeing 
all things in God," and Burnet with his heretical 
" Theory of the Earth," must unquestionably at times 
have betrayed an irritability which those about them 
may have attributed to temper, rather than to genius. 

Is our man of genius — not the victim of fancy, but 
the slave of truth — a learned author ? Of the living 
waters of human knowledge it cannot be said that " If 
a man drink thereof, he shall never thirst again." "What 
volumes remain to open ! what manuscript but makes 
his heart palpitate ! There is no term in researches 
which new facts may not alter, and a single date may 
not dissolve. Truth ! thou fascinating, but severe 
mistress, thy adorers are often broken down in thy 
servitude, performing a thousand unregarded task- 
works ! Now winding thee through thy labyrinth 
with a single thread, often unravelling — now feeling 
their way in darkness, doubtful if it be thyself they 
are touching. How much of the real labour of genius 
and erudition must remain concealed from the- world, 
and never be reached by their penetration! Montes- 
quieu has described this feeling after its agony ; " I 
thought I should have killed myself these three months 
to finish a morceau, (for his great work,) which I wished 
to insert, on the origin and revolutions of the civil laws 
in France. You will read it in three hours ; but I 
do assure you that it cost me so much labour, that it 
has whitened my hair." Mr. Hallam, stopping to ad- 



WRITERS OF LEARNING. 99 

mire the genius of Gibbon, exclaims, " In this, as in 
many other places, the masterly boldness and precision 
of his outline, which astonish those who have trod- 
den parts of the same field, is apt to escape an unin- 
formed reader." Thrice has my learned friend, Sharon 
Turner, recomposed, with renewed researches, the 
history of our ancestors, of which Milton and Hume 
had despaired — thrice, amidst the self-contests of ill- 
health and professional duties ! 

The man of erudition in closing his elaborate work 
is still exposed to the fatal omissions of wearied vigi- 
lance, or the accidental knowledge of some inferior 
mind, and always to the reigning taste, whatever it 
chance to be, of the public. Burnet criticised Varil- 
las unsparingly ; but when he wrote history himself, 
Harmer's " Specimen of Errors in Burnet's History," 
returned Burnet the pangs which he had inflicted on 
another. Newton's favourite work was his " Chro- 
nology," which he had written over fifteen times, yet 
he desisted from its publication during his life-time, 
from the ill-usage of which he complained. Even the 
" Optics " of Newton had no character at home till 
noticed in France. The calm temper of our great 
philosopher was of so fearful a nature in regard to 
criticism, that Whiston declares that he would not 
publish his attack on the Chronology, lest it might 
have killed our philosopher ; and thus Bishop Stil- 
lingfleet's end was hastened by Locke's confutation 
of his metaphysics. The feelings of Sir John Mar- 
sham could hardly be less irritable when he found his 
great work tainted by an accusation that it was not 
friendly to revelation. When the learned Pocock pub- 
h2 



100 ANXIETIES OF 

lished a specimen of his translation of Abulpharagius, 
an Arabian historian, in 1649, it excited great interest ; 
but in 1663, when he gave the world the complete 
version, it met with no encouragement : in the course 
of those thirteen years, the genius of the times had 
changed, and Oriental studies were no longer in 
request. 

The great Verulam profoundly felt the retardment 
of his fame ; for he has pathetically expressed this 
sentiment in his testament, where he bequeaths his 
name to posterity, after some generations shall be 
past. Bruce sunk into his grave defrauded of that just 
fame which his pride and vivacity perhaps too keenly 
prized, at least for his happiness, and which he authori- 
tatively exacted from an unwilling public. Mortified 
and indignant at the reception of his great labour by 
the cold-hearted scepticism of little minds, and the 
maliciousness of idling wits, he whose fortitude had 
toiled through a life of difficulty and danger, could not 
endure the laugh and scorn of public opinion ; for 
Bruce there was a simoon more dreadful than the 
Arabian, and from which genius cannot hide its head. 
Yet Bruce only met with the fate which Marco Polo 
had before encountered ; whose faithful narrative had 
been contemned by his contemporaries, and who was 
long thrown aside among legendary writers. 

Harvey, though his life was prolonged to his 
eightieth year, hardly lived to see his great discovery of 
the circulation of the blood established : no physician 
adopted it ; and when at length it was received, one 
party attempted to rob Harvey of the honour of the 
discovery, while another asserted that it was so obvious, 



WRITERS OF TASTE. 101 

that they could only express their astonishment that it 
had ever escaped observation. Incredulity and envy 
are the evil spirits which have often dogged great in- 
ventors to their tomb, and there only have vanished. — 
But I seem writing the " calamities of authors," and 
have only begun the catalogue. 

The reputation of a writer of taste is subject to more 
difficulties than any other. Similar was the fate of the 
finest ode writers in our poetry. On their publication, 
the odes of Collins could find no readers ; and those 
of Gray, though ushered into the reading world by the 
fashionable press of Walpole, were condemned as fail- 
ures. When Racine produced his " Athalie," it was 
not at all relished : Boileau indeed declared that he 
understood these matters better than the public, and 
prophesied that the public would return to it ; — they 
did so, but it was sixty years afterwards, and Racine 
died without suspecting; that "Athalie" was his master- 

J- o 

piece. I have heard one of our great poets regret that 
he had devoted so much of his life to the cultivation of 
his art, which arose from a project made in the golden 
vision of his youth : "At a time," said he, " when I 
thought that the fountain could never be dried up." 
" Your baggage will reach posterity," was observed. 
" There is much to spare," was the answer. 

Every day we may observe, of a work of genius, 
that those parts which have all the raciness of the soil, 
and as such are most liked by its admirers, are those which 
are the most criticised. Modest critics shelter them- 
selves under that general amnesty too freely granted, 
that tastes are allowed to differ ; but we should approx- 
imate much nearer to the truth, if we were to say, that 



102 ANXIETIES OF 

but few of mankind are prepared to relish the beautiful 
with that enlarged taste which comprehends all the 
forms of feeling which genius may assume ; forms which 
may be necessarily associated with defects. A man of 
genius composes in a state of intellectual emotion, and 
the magic of his style consists in the movements of his 
soul ; but the art of conveying those movements is far 
separated from the feeling which inspires them. The 
idea in the mind is not always found under the pen, any 
more than the artist's conception can always breathe in 
his pencil. Like Fiamingo's image, which he kept 
polishing till his friend exclaimed, " What perfection 
would you have ? " " Alas ! " exclaimed the sculptor, 
" the original I am labouring to come up to is in my 
head, but not yet in my hand." 

The writer toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw into 
our minds that sympathy with which we hang over the 
illusion of his pages, and become himself. Ariosto 
wrote sixteen different ways the celebrated stanza 
descriptive of a tempest, as appears by his MSS. at 
Ferrara ; and the version he preferred was the last of 
the sixteen. We know that Petrarch made forty-four 
alterations of a single verse ; " whether for the thought, 
the expression, or the harmony, it is evident that as 
many operations in the heart, the head, or the ear of 
the poet occurred," observes a man of genius, Ugo 
Foscolo. Quintilian and Horace dread the over-fond- 
ness of an author for his compositions : alteration is not 
always improvement. A picture over-finished fails in 
its effect. If the hand of the artist cannot leave it, 
how much beauty may it undo ! yet still he is lingering, 
still strengthening the weak, still subduing the daring, 



WRITERS OF TASTE. 103 

still searching for that single idea which awakens so 
many in the minds of others, while often, as it once 
happened, the dash of despair hangs the foam on the 
horse's nostrils. I have known a great sculptor, who 
for twenty years delighted himself with forming in his 
mind the nymph his hand was always creating. How 
rapturously he beheld her ! what inspiration ! what 
illusion ! Alas ! the last five years spoiled the beautiful 
which he had once reached, and could not stop and 
finish ! 

The art of composition indeed is of such slow attain- 
ment, that a man of genius, late in life, may discover 
how its secret conceals itself in the habit ; how disci- 
pline consists in exercise, how perfection comes from 
experience, and how unity is the last effort of judgment. 
When Fox meditated on a history which should last 
with the language, he met his evil genius in this new 
province. The rapidity and the fire of his elocution 
were extinguished by a pen unconsecrated by long and 
previous study ; he saw that he could not class with 
the great historians of every great people; he com- 
plained, while he mourned over the fragment of genius, 
which after such zealous preparation, he dared not com- 
plete. Curran, an orator of vehement eloquence, 
often strikingly original, when late in life he was de- 
sirous of cultivating literary composition, unaccustomed 
to its more gradual march, found a pen cold, and desti- 
tute of every grace. Rousseau has glowingly described 
the ceaseless inquietude by which he obtained the se- 
ductive eloquence of his style ; and has said, that with 
whatever talent a man may be born, the art of writing- 
is not easily obtained. The existing manuscripts of 



104 ANXIETIES OF ARTISTS. 

Rousseau display as many erasures as those of Ariosto 
or Petrarch ; they show his eagerness to dash down his 
first thoughts, and the art by which he raised them to 
the impassioned style of his imagination. The memoir 
of Gibbon was composed seven or nine times, and, after 
all, was left unfinished ; and Buffon tells us that he 
wrote his Epoques de la Nature eighteen times before it 
satisfied his taste. Burns's anxiety in finishing his 
poems was great ; " all my poetry," says he, " is the 
effect of easy composition, but of laborious correction 

Pope, when employed on the Iliad, found it not only 
occupy his thoughts by day,, but haunting his dreams 
by night, and once wished himself hanged, to get rid 01 
Homer : and that he experienced often such literary 
agonies, witness his description of the depressions and 
elevations of genius ; 

" Who pants for glory, finds but short repose ; 
A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows ! " 

When Romney undertook to commence the first sub 
ject for the Shakspeare Gallery, in the rapture of en 
thusiasm, amidst the sublime and pathetic labouring in 
his whole mind, arose the terror of failure. The sub- 
ject chosen was " The Tempest; " and as Hayley truly 
observes, it created many a tempest in the fluctuating 
spirits of Romney. The vehement desire of that per- 
fection which genius conceives, and cannot always 
execute, held a perpetual contest with that dejection 
of spirits which degrades the unhappy sufferer, and 
casts him, grovelling among the mean of his class. In 
a national work a man of genius pledges his honour to 
the world for its performance; but to redeem that 
pledge, there is a darkness in the uncertain issue, and 



ANXIETIES OF ARTISTS. 105 

he is risking his honour for ever. By that work he 
will always be judged, for public failures are never 
forgotten, and it is not then a party, but the public 
itself, who become his adversaries. With Romney it 
was " a fever of the mad ; " and his friends could 
scarcely inspire him with sufficient courage to proceed 
with his arduous picture, which exercised his imagina- 
tion and his pencil for several years. I have heard 
that he built a painting-room purposely for this picture ; 
and never did an anchorite pour forth a more fervent 
orison to Heaven, than Romney when this labour was 
complete. He had a fine genius, with all its solitary 
feelings, but he was uneducated, and incompetent even 
to write a letter ; yet on this occasion, relieved from 
his intense anxiety under so long a work, he wrote one 
of the most eloquent. It is a document in the history 
of genius, and reveals all those feelings which are here 
too faintly described*. I once heard an amiable 
author, whose literary career has perhaps not answered 
the fond hopes of his youth, half in anger and in love, 
declare that he would retire to some solitude, where, 
if any one would follow him, he would found a new 
order — the order of the disappointed. 

Thus the days of a man of genius are passed in labours 
as unremitting and exhausting as those of the artisan. 

* " My dear friend ; 
' " Your kindness in rejoicing so heartily at the birth of my picture, 
has given me great satisfaction. 

" There has been an anxiety labouring in my mind the greatest part 
of the last twelvemonth. At times it had nearly overwhelmed me. I 
thought I should absolutely have sunk into despair. O ! what a kind 
friend is, in those times ! I thank God, whatever my picture may be, 
I can say thus much, — I am a greater philosopher, and a better Chris- 
tian." 



106 GENIUS SELDOM SATISFIED. 

The world is not always aware, that to some, medi- 
tation, composition, and even conversation, may inflict 
pains undetected by the eye and the tenderness of 
friendship. Whenever Rousseau passed a morning in 
society, it was observed, that in the evening he was 
dissatisfied and distressed; and John Hunter, in a 
mixed company, found that conversation fatigued, in- 
stead of amusing him. Hawkesworth, in the second 
paper of the Adventurer, has drawn, from his own feel- 
ings, an eloquent comparative estimate of intellectual 
with corporeal labour; it may console the humble 
mechanic : and Plato, in his work on laws, seems to 
have been aware of this analogy, for he consecrates all 
working men or artisans to Vulcan and Minerva, be- 
cause both those deities alike are hard labourers. Yet 
with genius all does not terminate, even with the most 
skilful labour. What the toiling Vulcan, and the 
thoughtful Minerva may want, will too often be absent 
— the presence of the Graces. In the allegorical pic- 
ture of the School of Design, by Carlo Maratti, where 
the students are led through their various studies, in 
the opening clouds above the academy are seen the 
Graces, hovering over their pupils, with an inscription 
they must often recollect, — Senza di noi ogni fatica e 
vana. 

The anxious uncertainty of an author for his compo- 
sitions resembles the anxiety of a lover when he has 
written to a mistress who has not yet decided on his 
claims ; he repents his labour, for he thinks he has 
written too much, while he is mortified at recollecting 
that he had omitted some things which he imagines 
would have secured the object of his wishes. Madame 



EXTREME SENSIBILITY OF GENIUS. 107 

De Stael, who has often entered into feelings familiar 
to a. literary and political family, in a parallel between 
ambition and genius, has distinguished them in this ; 
that while " ambition perseveres in the desire of acquir- 
ing power, genius flags of itself. Genius in the midst 
of society is a pain, an internal fever which would re- 
quire to be treated as a real disease, if the records of 
glory did not soften the sufferings it produces." "Athe- 
nians ! what troubles have you not cost me," ex- 
claimed Demosthenes, " that I may be talked of by 
you!" 

These moments of anxiety often darken the brightest 
hours of genius. Racine had extreme sensibility ; the 
pain inflicted by a severe criticism outweighed all the 
applause he received. He seems to have felt, what he 
was often reproached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, 
and his Turks, were all inmates of Versailles. He had 
two critics, who, like our Dennis with Pope and Addi- 
son, regularly dogged his pieces as they appeared. 
Corneille's objections he would attribute to jealousy — 
at his pieces when burlesqued at the Italian theatre, he 
would smile outwardly, though sick at heart ; — but his 
son informs us, that a stroke of raillery from his witty 
friend Chapelle, whose pleasantry hardly sheathed its 
bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart than the 
burlesques at the Italian theatre, the protest of Corneille, 
and the iteration of the two Dennises. More than once 
Moliere and Racine, in vexation of spirit, resolved to 
abandon their dramatic career ; it was Boileau who 
ceaselessly animated their languor: "Posterity," he 
cried, "will avenge the injustice of our age!" And 
Congreve's comedies met with such moderate success. 



108 EXTREME SENSIBILITY OF GENIUS. 

that it appears the author was extremely mortified, and 
on the ill reception of " The Way of theWorld," deter- 
mined to write no more for the stage. When he told 
Voltaire, on the French wit's visit, that Voltaire must 
consider him as a private gentleman, and not as an 
author, which apparent affectation called down on Con 
greve the sarcastic severity of the French author, more 
of mortification and humility might have been in Con- 
greve's language than of affectation or pride. 

The life of Tasso abounds with pictures of a com 
plete exhaustion of this kind. His contradictory critics 
had perplexed him with the most intricate literary dis- 
cussions, and either occasioned or increased a mental 
alienation. In one of his letters, we find that he repents 
the composition of his great poem, for although his own 
taste approved of that marvellous, which still forms a 
noble part of its creation, yet he confesses that his cold 
reasoning critics have decided, that the history of his 
hero Godfrey required another species of conduct. 
" Hence," cries the unhappy bard, " doubts torment 
me ; but for the past, and what is done, I know of no 
remedy;" and he longs to precipitate the publication, 
that " he may be delivered from misery and agony." 
He solemnly swears, — " did not the circumstances of 
my situation compel me, I would not print it, even 
perhaps during my life, I so much doubt of its success." 
Such was that painful state of fear and doubt expe- 
rienced by the author of the "Jerusalem Delivered," 
when he gave it to the world ; a state of suspense, 
among the children of imagination, in which none are 
more liable to participate, than the true sensitive artist. 
We may now inspect the severe correction of Tasso's 



EXTREME SENSIBILITY OF GENIUS. 10Q 

muse, in the fac-simile of a page of his manuscripts in 
Mr. Dibdin's late Tour. She seems to have inflicted 
tortures on his pen, surpassing even those which may 
be seen in the fac-simile page which, thirty years ago, 
I gave of Pope's Homer. At Florence may still be 
viewed the many works begun and abandoned by the 
genius of Michael Angelo ; they are preserved in- 
violate — " so sacred is the terror of Michael Angelo's 
genius \" exclaims Forsyth. These works are not 
always to be considered as failures of the chisel ; they 
appear rather to have been rejected for coming short of 
the artist's first conceptions : yet, in a strain of sublime 
poetry, he has preserved his sentiments on the force of 
intellectual labour ; he thought that there was nothing 
which the imagination conceived, that could not be 
made visible in marble, if the hand were made to obey 
the mind : — . 

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto, 
Ch' un marmo solo in se non circoscriva 
Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva 

La man che obbedisce all' intelletto. 

IMITATED. 

The sculptor never yet conceived a thought 
That yielding marble has refused to aid ; 

But never with a mastery he wrought — 
Save when the hand the intellect obeyed. 

An interesting domestic story has been preserved of 
Gesner, who so zealously devoted his graver and his 
pencil to the arts. His sensibility was ever struggling 
after that ideal excellence which he could not attain. 
Often he sunk into fits of melancholy, and, gentle as he 
was, the tenderness of his wife and friends could not 
soothe his distempered feelings; it was necessary to 



110 EXTREME SENSIBILITY OF GENIUS. 

abandon him to his own thoughts, till, after a long absti- 
nence from his neglected works, in a lucid moment, some 
accident occasioned him to return to them. In one of 
these hypochondria of genius, after a long interval of 
despair, one morning at breakfast with his wife, his eye 
fixed on one of his pictures ; it was a group of fawns 
with young shepherds dancing at the entrance of a 
cavern shaded with vines ; his eye appeared at length to 
glisten ; and a sudden return to good humour broke out 
in this lively apostrophe, " Ah ! see those playful 
children, they always dance I" This was the moment 
of gaiety and inspiration, and he flew to his forsaken 
easel. 

La Harpe, an author by profession, observes, that as 
it has been shown, that there are some maladies peculiar 
to artisans,* — there are also some sorrows peculiar to 
them, and which the world can neither pity nor soften 
because they do not enter into their experience. Th 
querulous language of so many men of genius has been 
sometimes attributed to causes very different from the 
real ones, — the most fortunate live to see their talents 
contested and their best works decried. Assuredly 
many an author has sunk into his grave without the 
consciousness of having obtained that fame for which he 
had sacrificed an arduous life. The too feeling Smollet 
has left this testimony to posterity. " Had some of 
those, who are pleased to call themselves my friends, 
been at any pains to deserve the character, and told me 

* See Ramazini, " De Morbis Artificium Diatriba," wbich Dr. 
James translated in 1750. It is a sad reflection, resulting from this 
curious treatise, that the arts entail no small mischief upon their 
respective workmen ; so that the means by which they live are too 
often the occasion of their being hurried out of the world. 



EXTREME SENSIBILITY OF GENIUS. Ill 

ingenuously what I had to expect in the capacity of an 
author, I should, in all probability, have spared myself 
the incredible labour and chagrin I have since under- 
gone." And Smollet was a popular writer ! Pope's 
solemn declaration in the preface to his collected works 
comes by no means short of Smollet's avowaL 
Hume's philosophical indifference could often suppress 
that irritability which Pope and Smollet fully indulged. 
But were the feelings of Hume more obtuse, or did 
his temper, gentle as it was by constitution, bear, with 
a saintly patience, the mortifications his literary life so 
long endured ? After recomposing two of his works, 
which incurred the same neglect in their altered form, 
he raised the most sanguine hopes of his History, — but 
he tells us, " miserable was my disappointment !" Al- 
though he never deigned to reply to his opponents, yet 
they haunted him; and an eye-witness has thus 
described the irritated author discovering in conversation 
his suppressed resentment — " His forcible mode of ex- 
pression, the brilliant quick movements of his eyes, and 
the gestures of his body," — these betrayed the pangs of 
contempt, or of aversion ! Hogarth, in a fit of the 
spleen, advertised that he had determined not to give 
the world any more original works, and intended to pass 
the rest of his days in painting portraits. The same 
advertisement is marked by farther irritability. He 
contemptuously offers the purchasers of his " Analysis 
of Beauty," to present them gratis with " an eighteen- 
penny pamphlet," published by Ramsay the painter, 
written in opposition to Hogarth's principles. So un- 
tameable was the irritability of this great inventor in 
art, that he attempts to conceal his irritation by offering 



112 EXTREME SENSIBILITY OF GENIUS. 

to dispose gratuitously of the criticism which had dis- 
turbed his nights. 

Parties confederate against a man of genius, as hap- 
pened to Corneille, to D'Avenant,* and Milton, and a 
Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed of a Racine 
and a Dry den. It was to support the drooping spirit 
of his friend Racine on the opposition raised against 
Phsedra, that Boileau addressed to him an epistle " On 
the Utility to be drawn from the Jealousy of the Envious." 
The calm dignity of the historian De Thou, amidst the 
passions of his times, confidently expected that justice 
from posterity which his own age refused to his early 
and his late labour. That great man was, however, 
compelled, by his injured feelings, to compose a poem, 
under the name of another, to serve as his apology 
against the intolerant Court of Rome, and the factious 
politicians of France ; it was a noble subterfuge to which 
a great genius was forced. The acquaintances of the 
poet Collins probably complained of his wayward 
humours and irritability ; but how could they sympa- 
thise with the secret mortification of the poet, who ima- 
gined that he had composed his Pastorals on wrong 
principles, or, when in the agony of his soul, he con- 
signed to the flames with his own hands his unsold, but 
immortal Odes ? Can we forget the dignified complaint 
of the Rambler, with which he awfully closes his work, 
appealing to posterity ? 

* See " Quarrels of Authors," vol. ii. on the confederacy of several 
wits against D'Avenant, a great genius ; where I discovered that a 
volume of poems, said " to he written hy the author's friends," which 
had hitherto heen referred to as a volume of panegyrics, contains nothing • 
but irony and satire, which had escaped the discovery of so many tran- 
scribers of title-pages, frequently miscalled literary historians. 



EXTREME IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 113 

Genius contracts those peculiarities, of which it is so 
loudly accused, in its solitary occupations. That lofti- 
ness of spirit, those quick jealousies, those excessive 
affections and aversions, which view every thing, as it 
passes in its own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in 
the mediocrity of reality. If this irritability of genius 
be a malady which has raged even among philosophers, 
we must not be surprised at the temperament of poets. 
These last have abandoned their country, they have 
changed their name, they have punished themselves with 
exile in the rage of their disorder. No ! not poets only. 
Descartes sought in vain, even in his secreted life, for 
a refuge for his genius ; he thought himself persecuted 
in France, he thought himself calumniated among 
strangers, and he went and died in Sweden ; and little 
did that man of genius think, that his countrymen 
would beg to have his ashes restored to them. Even 
the reasoning Hume once proposed to change his name 
and his country, and I believe did. The great poetical 
genius of our own times has openly alienated himself 
from the land of his brothers. He becomes immortal in 
the language of a people whom he would contemn* : 

* I shall preserve a manuscript note of Lord Byron on this passage ; 
not without a hope that we shall never receive from him the genius of 
Italian poetry, otherwise than in the language of his "father-land;" 
an expressive term, which I adopted from the Dutch language some 
years past, and which I have seen since sanctioned hy the pens of Lord 
Byron and of Mr. Southey. 

His lordship has here ohserved, "It is not my fault that I am 
obliged to write in English. If I understood my present language 
equally well, I would write in it ; but this will require ten years at 
least to form a style : no tongue so easy to acquire a little of, or so 
difficult to master thoroughly, as Italian." On the same page I find 
the following note : " What was rumoured of me in that language ? If 
true, I was unfit for England : if false, England was unfit for me : — 



114 EXTREME IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

Does he accept with ingratitude the fame he loves more 
than life? 

Such then is that state of irritability in which men of 
genius participate, whether they be inventors — men of 
learning — fine writers — or artists. It is a state not 
friendly to equality of temper. In the various humours 
incidental to it, when they are often deeply affected, the 
cause escapes all perception of sympathy. — The intel- 
lectual malady eludes even the tenderness of friendship. 
At those moments, the lightest injury to the feelings, 
which at another time would make no impression, may 
produce a perturbed state of feeling in the warm temper, 
or the corroding chagrin of a self-wounded spirit 
These are moments which claim the encouragements of 
a friendship animated by a high esteem for the intellec 
tual excellence of the man of genius — not the general 
intercourse of society, — not the insensibility of the dull, 
nor the levity of the volatile. 

Men of genius are often reverenced only where they 
are known by their writings ; intellectual beings in the 
romance of life — in its history, they are men ! 
Erasmus compared them to the great figures in tapes- 
try-work, which lose their effect when not seen at a 
distance. Their foibles and their infirmities are obvious 
to their associates, often only capable of discerning 
these qualities. The defects of great men are the con- 
solation of the dunces. 

' There is a world elsewhere.' I have never regretted for a moment 
that country, but often that I ever returned to it at all." 



LITERARY MEN IN SOCIETY. 115 



CHAPTER VIII. 

The spirit of literature and the spirit of society. — The Inventors. — 
Society offers seduction and not reward to men of genius. — The 
notions of persons of fashion of men of genius. — The habitudes of 
the man of genius distinct from those of the man of society. — Study, 
meditation, and enthusiasm, the progress of genius. — The disagree- 
ment between the men of the world and the literary character. 

The inventors who inherited little or nothing from 
their predecessors, appear to have pursued their insulated 
studies in the full independence of their mind and de- 
velopment of their inventive faculty ; they stood apart, 
in seclusion, the solitary lights of their age. Such were 
the founders of our literature ; Bacon and Hobbes, 
Newton and Milton. Even so late as the days of 
Dryden, Addison, and Pope, the man of genius drew 
his circle round his intimates ; his day was uniform, 
his habits unbroken, and he was never too far removed, 
nor too long estranged, from meditation and reverie : 
his works were the sources of his pleasure, ere they 
became the labours of his pride. 

But when a more uniform light of knowledge illumi- 
nates from all sides, the genius of society, made up of 
so many sorts of genius, becomes greater than the genius 
of the individual who has entirely yielded himself up 
to his solitary art. Hence the character of a man of 
genius becomes subordinate. A conversation age suc- 
ceeds a studious one, and the family of genius, the poet, 
the painter, and the student, are no longer recluses, 
i 2 



116 SOCIETY OFFERS SEDUCTION, AND NOT 

They mix with their rivals, who are jealous of equality, 
or with others, who, incapable of valuing them for 
themselves alone, rate them but as parts of an integral. . 

The man of genius is now trammelled with the arti- 
ficial and mechanical forms of life ; and in too close an 
intercourse with society, the loneliness and raciness of 
thinking is modified away in its seductive conventions. 
An excessive indulgence in the pleasures of social life, 
constitutes the great interests of a luxuriant and opu- 
lent age ; but of late, while the arts of assembling in 
large societies have been practised, varied by all forms, 
and pushed on to all excesses, it may become a question 
whether by them our happiness is as much improved 
or our individual character as well formed, as in a 
society not so heterogeneous and unsocial, as that crowd, 
termed, with the sort of modesty peculiar to our times, 
" a small party :" the simplicity of parade, the humility 
of pride, engendered by the egotism which multiplies 
itself in proportion to the numbers it assembles. 

It may, too, be a question whether the literary man 
and the artist are not immolating their genius to society, 
when, in the shadowiness of assumed talents — that 
counterfeiting of all shapes, they lose their real form, 
with the mockery of Proteus. But nets of roses catch 
their feet, and a path where all the senses are flattered 
is now opened to win an Epictetus from his hut. The 
art of multiplying the enjoyments of society is dis- 
covered in the morning lounge, the evening dinner, and 
the midnight coterie. In frivolous fatigues, and vigils 
without meditation, perish the unvalued hours which, 
true genius knows, are always too brief for art, and too 
rare to catch its inspirations. Hence so many of our 



REWARD, TO MEN OP GENIUS. 117 

contemporaries, whose card-racks are crowded, have 
produced only flashy fragments. Efforts, but not 
works ; they seem to be effects without causes ; — and 
as a great author, who is not one of them, once ob- 
served to me, " they waste a barrel of gunpowder in 
squibs." 

And yet it is seduction, and not reward, which mere 
fashionable society offers the man of true genius. He 
will be sought for with enthusiasm, but he cannot 
escape from his certain fate — that of becoming tiresome 
to his pretended admirers. 

At first the idol —shortly he is changed into a victim. 
He forms, indeed, a figure in their little pageant, and 
is invited as a sort of hnprovisatore ; but the esteem 
they concede to him is only a part of the system of 
politeness ; and should he be dull in discovering the 
favourite quality of their self-love, or in participating 
in their volatile tastes, he will find frequent oppor- 
tunities of observing, with the sage at the court of 
Cyprus, that " what he knows, is not proper for this 
place ; and what is proper for this place, he knows not." 
This society takes little personal interest in the literary 
character. Horace Walpole lets us into this secret 
when writing to another man of fashion, on such a 
man of genius as Gray : "I agree with you most abso- 
lutely in your opinion about Gray ; he is the worst 
company in the world. From a melancholy turn, from 
living reclusely, and from a little too much dignity, he 
never converses easily ; all his words are measured and 
chosen and formed into sentences : his writings are 
admirable — he himself is not agreeable." This volatile 
being in himself personified the quintessence of that 



118 SOCIETY OFFERS SEDUCTION, AND NOT 

society which is called u the world," and could not 
endure that equality of intellect which genius exacts. 
He rejected Chatterton, and quarrelled with every 
literary man and every artist whom he first invited to 
familiarity — and then hated. Witness the fates of 
Bentley, of Muntz, of Gray, of Cole, and others. Such 
a mind was incapable of appreciating the literary glory 
on which the mighty mind of Burke was meditating. 
Walpole knew Burke at a critical moment of his life, 
and he has recorded his own feelings. " There was a 
young Mr. Burke who wrote a book in the style of 
Lord Bolingbroke, that was much admired. He is a 
sensible man, but has not worn of Ms author ism yet > 
and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and 
to be one : — he will know better one of these days." Gray 
and Burke ! What mighty men must be submitted 
to the petrifying sneer, that indifference of selfism for 
great sympathies, of this volatile and heartless man of 
literature and rank ! 



That tiling of silk, 



Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk !" 

The confidential confession of Racine to his son is 
remarkable : " Do not think that I am sought after by 
the great for my dramas ; Corneille composes nobler 
verses than mine, but no one notices him, and he only 
pleases by the mouth of the actors. I never allude to 
my works when with men of the world, but I amuse 
them about matters they like to hear. My talent with 
them consists, not in making them feel that I have any, 
but in showing them that they have." Racine treated 
the great like the children of society ; Corneille 
would not compromise for the tribute he exacted, but 



REWARD, TO MEN OF GENIUS. 119 

he consoled himself when at his entrance into the 
theatre the audience usually rose to salute him. The 
great comic genius of France, who indeed was a very 
thoughtful and serious man, addressed a poem to the 
painter Mignard, expressing his conviction that " the 
court," by which a Frenchman of the court of Louis 
XIY. meant the society we call " fashionable," is fatal 
to the perfection of art : 

" Qui se donne a. la cour se derobe a son art ; 
Un esprit par tag e rarement se consomme, 
Et les emplois de feu demandent tout rhomme." 

Has not the fate in society of our reigning literary 
favourites been uniform ? Their mayoralty hardly 
exceeds the year : they are pushed aside to put in their 
place another, who, in his turn, must descend. Such 
is the history of the literary character encountering 
the perpetual difficulty of appearing what he really is 
not, while he sacrifices to a few, in a certain corner of 
the metropolis, who have long fantastically styled 
themselves " the world," that more dignified celebrity 
which makes an author's name more familiar than his 
person. To one who appeared astonished at the exten- 
sive celebrity of Buffon, the modern Pliny replied, 
" I have passed fifty years at my desk." Haydn would 
not yield up to society more than those hours which 
were not devoted to study. These were indeed but 
few : and such were the uniformity and retiredness of 
his life, that "He was for a long time the only musical 
man in Europe who was ignorant of the celebrity of 
Joseph Haydn." And has not one, the most sublime 
of the race, sung, 

che seggendo in piuma, 

In Fama nou si vien, ne sotto coltre ; 



120 WHY GENIUS MIXES WITH SOCIETY. 

Sanzala qual chi sua vita consuma 

Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia 

Qual fummo in aere, ed in acqua la schiuma. 

" For not on downy plumes, nor under shade 
Of canopy reposing, Fame is won; 
Without which, whosoe'er consumes his days, 
Leaveth such vestige of himself on earth 
As smoke in air, or foam upon the wave.*" 

But men of genius, in their intercourse with persons 
of fashion, have a secret inducement to court that 
circle. They feel a perpetual want of having the real- 
ity of their talents confirmed to themselves, and they 
often step into society to observe in what degree they 
are objects of attention ; for, though ever accused of 
vanity, the greater part of men of genius feel that their 
existence, as such, must depend on the opinions of others. 
This standard is in truth always problematical and 
variable ; yet they cannot hope to find a more certain 
one among their rivals, who at all times are adroitly 
depreciating their brothers, and " dusking " their lustre. 
They discover among those cultivators of literature and 
the arts who have recourse to them for their pleasure, 
impassioned admirers, rather than unmerciful judges; 
judges, who have only time to acquire that degree of 
illumination which is just sufficient to set at ease the 
fears of these claimants of genius. 

"When literary men assemble together, what mimetic 
friendships, in their mutual corruption ! Creatures of 
intrigue, they borrow other men's eyes, and act by 
feelings often even contrary to their own : they wear a 
mask on their face, and only sing a tune they have 
caught. Some Hierophant in their mysteries proclaims 
their elect whom they have to initiate, and their profane 



Cary's Dante, Canto xxiv. 






FALSE FRIENDSHIPS OF LITERARY MEN. 121 

who are to stand apart under their ban. They bend to 
the spirit of the age, but they do not elevate the public 
to them ; they care not for truth, but only study to 
produce effect, and they do nothing for fame but what 
obtains an instant purpose. Yet their fame is not 
therefore the more real, for every thing connected with 
fashion becomes obsolete. Her ear has a great suscep- 
tibility of weariness, and her eye rolls for incessant 
novelty. Never was she earnest for any thing. Men's 
minds with her became tarnished and old-fashioned as 
furniture. But the steams of rich dinners, the eye 
which sparkles with the wines of France, the luxurious 
night which flames with more heat and brilliancy than 
God has made the day, this is the world the man of 
coterie-celebrity has chosen ; and the Epicurean, as long 
as his senses do not cease to act, laughs at the few who 
retire to the solitary midnight lamp. Posthumous fame 
is — a nothing ! Such men live like unbelievers in a 
future state, and their narrow calculating spirit coldly 
dies in their artificial world : but true genius looks at a 
nobler source of its existence ; it catches inspiration in 
its insulated studies; and to the great genius, who 
feels how his present is necessarily connected with his 
future celebrity, posthumous fame is a reality — for the 
sense acts upon him ! 

The habitudes of genius, before genius loses its fresh- 
ness in this society, are the mould in which the charac- 
ter is cast ; and these, in spite of all the disguise of the 
man, will make him a distinct being from the man of 
society. Those who have assumed the literary charac- 
ter, often for purposes very distinct from literary ones, 
imagine that their circle is the public ; but in this fac- 



122 HABITS OF GENIUS DISTINCT 

titious public all their interests, their opinions, and even 
their passions, are temporary, and the admirers with 
the admired pass away with their season. " It is not 
sufficient that we speak the same language," says a 
witty philosopher, " but we must learn their dialect ; 
we must think as they think, and we must echo their 
opinions, as we act by imitation." Let the man of 
genius then dread to level himself to the mediocrity of 
feeling and talent required in such circles of society, 
lest he become one of themselves ; he will soon find 
that to think like them, will in time become to act like 
them. But he who in solitude adopts no transient 
feelings, and reflects no artificial lights, who is only 
himself, possesses an immense advantage : he has not 
attached importance to what is merely local and fugi- 
tive, but listens to interior truths, and fixes on the 
immutable nature of things. He is the man of every 
age. Malebranche has observed, that " It is not indeed 
thought to be charitable to disturb common opinions, 
because it is not truth which unites society as it exists, 
so much as opinion and custom:" a principle which 
the world would not, I think, disagree with ; but which 
tends to render folly wisdom itself, and to make error 
immortal. 

Ridicule is the light scourge of society, and the 
terror of genius. Ridicule surrounds him with her 
chimeras, which, like the shadowy monsters opposing 
iEneas, are impalpable to his strokes : but remember, 
when the sibyl bade the hero proceed without noticing 
them, he found these airy nothings as harmless as they 
were unreal. The habits of the literary character will 
however be tried by the men and women of the world 



FROM THOSE OF SOCIETY. 123 

by their own standard : they have no other ; the salt 
of ridicule gives a poignancy to their deficient compre- 
hension and their perfect ignorance of the persons or 
things which are the subjects of their ingenious animad- 
versions. The habits of the literary character seem 
inevitably repulsive to persons of the world. Vol- 
taire, and his companion, the scientific Madame De 
Chatelet, she who introduced Newton to the French 
nation, lived entirely devoted to literary pursuits, and 
their habits were strictly literary. It happened" once 
that this learned pair dropped unexpectedly into a fash- 
ionable circle in the chateau of a French nobleman. A 
Madame de Stael, the persifleur in office of Madame Du 
Deffand, has copiously narrated the whole affair. They 
arrived at midnight, like two famished spectres, and 
there was some trouble to put them to supper and bed. 
They are called apparitions, because they were never 
visible by day, only at ten at night ; for the one is 
busied in describing great deeds, and the other in com- 
menting on Newton. Like other apparitions, they are 
uneasy companions : they will neither play nor walk ; 
they will not dissipate their mornings with the charm- 
ing circle about them, nor allow the charming circle to 
break into their studies. Voltaire and Madame De 
Chatelet would have suffered the same pain in being 
forced to an abstinence of their regular studies, as this 
circle of " agreables " would have at the loss of their 
meals and their airings. However, the persifleur de- 
clares they were ciphers " en society," adding no value 
to the number, and to which their learned writings bear 
no reference. 

But if this literary couple would not play, what was. 



124 STUDY, MEDITATION, AND ENTHUSIASM, 

worse, Voltaire poured out a vehement declamation 
against a fashionable species of gambling, which appears 
to have made them all stare. But Madame de Chatelet 
is the more frequent victim of our persifleur. The 
learned lady would change her apartment — for it was 
too noisy, and it had smoke without fire, — which last 
was her emblem. " She is reviewing her Principia ; 
an exercise she repeats every year, without which pre- 
caution they might escape from her, and get so far away 
that she might never find them again. I believe that 
her head in respect to them is a house of imprisonment 
rather than the place of their birth ; so that she is right 
to watch them closely ; and she prefers the fresh air of 
this occupation to our amusements, and persists in her 
invisibility till night-time. She has six or seven tables 
in her apartments, for she wants them of all sizes; 
immense ones to spread out her papers — solid ones to 
hold her instruments — lighter ones, &c. Yet with all 
this she could not escape from the accident which hap- 
pened to Philip II., after passing the night in writing, 
when a bottle of ink fell over the despatches ; but the 
lady did not imitate the moderation of the prince ; 
indeed she had not written on state affairs, and what 
was spoilt in her room was algebra, much more difficult 
to copy out." Here is a pair of portraits of a great 
poet and a great mathematician, whose habits were 
discordant with the fashionable circle in which they 
resided — the representation is just, for it is by one of 
the coterie itself. 

Study, meditation, and enthusiasm, — this is the 
progress of genius, and these cannot be the habits of 
him who lingers till he can only live among polished 



THE PROGRESS OF GENIUS. 125 

crowds ; who, if he bear about him the consciousness 
of genius, will still be acting under their influences. 
And perhaps there never was one of this class of men 
who had not either first entirely formed himself in soli- 
tude, or who amidst society will not be often breaking 
out to seek for himself. Wilkes, no longer touched by 
the fervours of literary and patriotic glory, suffered life 
to melt away as a domestic voluptuary ; and then it was 
that he observed with some surprise of the great Earl of 
Chatham, that he sacrificed every pleasure of social 
life, even in youth, to his great pursuit of eloquence. 
That ardent character studied Barrow's Sermons so 
often as to repeat them from memory, and could even 
read twice from beginning to end Bailey's Dictionary ; 
these are little facts which belong only to great minds ! 
The earl himself acknowledged an artifice he practised 
in his intercourse with society, for he said, " when he 
was young, he always came late into company, and left 
it early." Vittorio Alfieri, and a brother-spirit, our 
own noble poet, were rarely seen amidst the brilliant 
circle in which they were born. The workings of their 
imagination were perpetually emancipating them, and 
one deep loneliness of feeling proudly insulated them 
among the unim passioned triflers of their rank. They 
preserved unbroken the unity of their character, in 
constantly escaping from the processional spectacle of 
society. * It is no trivial observation of another noble 

* In a note which Lord Byron has written in a copy of this work 
his lordship says, " I fear this was not the case ; I have been but too 
much in that circle, especially in 1812-13-14." 

To the expression of " one deep loneliness of feeling," his lordship 
has marked in the margin "True." I am gratified to confirm the" 
theory of my ideas of the man of genius, by the practical experience 
of the greatest of our age. 



126 LITERARY CHARACTER NOT 

writer, Lord Shaftesbury, that " it may happen that 
a person may be so much the worse author, for being 
the finer gentleman." 

An extraordinary instance of this disagreement be- 
tween the man of the world and the literary character, 
we find in a philosopher seated on a throne. The cele- 
brated Julian stained the imperial purple with an 
author's ink ; and when he resided among the Anti- 
ochians, his unalterable character shocked that volatile 
and luxurious race. He slighted the plaudits of their 
theatre, he abhorred their dances and their horse-races, 
he was abstinent even at a festival, and incorrupt him- 
self, perpetually admonished the dissipated citizens of 
their impious abandonment of the laws of their country. 
The Antiochians libelled their emperor, and petulantly 
lampooned his beard, which the philosopher carelessly 
wore neither perfumed nor curled. Julian, scorning 
to inflict a sharper punishment, pointed at them his 
satire of " the Misopogon, or the Antiochian ; the 
Enemy of the Beard," where amidst irony and invec- 
tive, the literary monarch bestows on himself many 
exquisite and characteristic touches. All that the per- 
sons of fashion alleged against the literary character, 
Julian unreservedly confesses — his undressed beard 
and awkwardnesses, his obstinacy, his unsociable habits, 
his deficient tastes, while at the same time he repre- 
sents his good qualities as so many extravagancies. 
But, in this Cervantic pleasantry of self-reprehension, 
the imperial philosopher has not failed to show this 
light and corrupt people that the reason he could not 
possibly resemble them, existed in the unhappy circum- 
stance of having been subject to too strict an education 



ADAPTED FOR MIXED SOCIETY. 127 

under a family tutor, who had never suffered him to 
swerve from the one right way, and who (additional 
misfortune !) had inspired him with such a silly reve- 
rence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and Theophrastus, 
that he had been induced to make them his models. 
" Whatever manners," says the emperor, " I may have 
previously contracted, whether gentle or boorish, it is 
impossible for me now to alter or unlearn. Habit is 
said to be a second nature ; to oppose it is irksome, 
but to counteract the study of more than thirty years is 
extremely difficult, especially when it has been imbibed 
with so much attention." 

And what if men of genius, relinquishing their habits, 
could do this violence to their nature, should we not 
lose the original for a factitious genius, and spoil one 
race without improving the other ? If nature, and 
habit, that second nature which prevails even over the 
first, have created two beings distinctly different, what 
mode of existence shall ever assimilate them ? Anti- 
pathies and sympathies, those still occult causes, how- 
ever concealed, will break forth at an unguarded moment. 
Clip the wings of an eagle that he may roost among 
domestic fowls, — at some unforeseen moment his pinions 
will overshadow and terrify his tiny associates, for " the 
feathered king" will be still musing on the rock and the 
cloud. 

The man of genius will be restive even in his tram- 
melled paces. Too impatient amidst the heartless 
courtesies of society, and little practised in the minuter 
attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing 
graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously com- 
pares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apo- 



128 LITERARY CHARACTERS NOT 

thecaries : the grotesque figures of owls and apes were 
painted on their exterior, but they contained within 
precious balsams. The man of genius amidst many 
a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, " I cannot 
fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city ;" 
and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at 
his own deficiencies, and even disdain to please in cer- 
tain conventional manners, asserting that " wanting all 
these things, he was not the less Corneille." 

But with the great thinkers and students, their 
character is still more obdurate. Adam Smith could 
never free himself from the embarrassed manners of a 
recluse ; he was often absent, and his grave and formal 
conversation made him seem distant and reserved, when 
in fact no man had warmer feelings for his intimates. 
One who knew Sir Isaac Newton tells us, that " he 
would sometimes be silent and thoughtful, and look all 
the while as if he were saying his prayers." A French 
princess, desirous of seeing the great moralist Nicolle, 
experienced an inconceivable disappointment when the 
moral instructor, entering with the most perplexing- 
bow imaginable, silently sank into his chair. The 
interview promoted no conversation, and the retired 
student, whose elevated spirit might have endured 
martyrdom, shrunk with timidity in the unaccustomed 
honour of conversing with a princess and having nothing 
to say. Observe Hume thrown into a most ridiculous 
attitude by a woman of talents and coterie celebrity. 
Our philosopher was called on to perform his part in 
one of those inventions of the hour to which the fashion- 
able, like children in society, have sometimes resorted 
to attract their world by the rumour of some new 






ADAPTED FOR MIXED SOCIETY. 129 

extravagance. In the present, poor Hume was to 
represent a sultan on a sofa, sitting between two slaves, 
who were the prettiest and most vivacious of Parisians. 
Much was anticipated from this literary exhibition. 
The two slaves were ready at repartee, but the utter 
simplicity of the sultan, displayed a blockishness which 
blunted all edge. The phlegmatic metaphysician and 
historian, only gave a sign of life by repeating the same 
awkward gesture, and the same ridiculous exclamation, 
without end. One of the fair slaves soon discovered 
the unchangeable nature of the forlorn philosopher, 
impatiently exclaiming, " I guessed as much, never was 
there such a calf of a man ! " — " Since this affair," adds 
Madame d'Epinay, " Hume is at present banished to 
the class of spectators. " The philosopher, indeed, had 
formed a more correct conception of his own character 
than the volatile sylphs of the Parisian circle, for in 
writing to the Countess de Boufflers, on an invitation 
to Paris, he said, " I have rusted on amid books and 
study ; have been little engaged in the active, and not 
much in the pleasurable, scenes of life ; and am more 
accustomed to a select society than to general com- 
panies." If Hume made a ridiculous figure in these 
circles, the error did not lie on the side of that cheerful 
and profound philosopher. — This subject leads our 
inquiries to the nature of the conversations of men of 
genius. 



130 CONVERSATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 



CHAPTER IX. 

Conversations of men of genius Their deficient agreeableness may 

result from qualities which conduce to their greatness. — Slow-minded 
men not the dullest. — The conversationists not the ablest writers. — 
Their true excellence in conversation consists of associations with 
their pursuits. 

In conversation the sublime Dante was taciturn or 
satirical ; Butler sullen or caustic ; Gray and Alfieri 
seldom talked or smiled ; Descartes, whose habits had 
formed him for solitude and meditation, was silent ; 
Rousseau was remarkably trite in conversation, not an 
idea, not a word of fancy or eloquence warmed him ; 
Addison and Moliere in society were only observers ; 
and Dryden has very honestly told us, " My conver- 
sation is slow and dull, my humour saturnine and re- 
served ; in short, I am none of those who endeavour to 
break jests in company, or make repartees." Pope had 
lived among " the great," not only in rank but in intel- 
lect, the most delightful conversationists ; but the poet 
felt that he could not contribute to these seductive 
pleasures, and at last confessed that he could amuse and 
instruct himself much more by another means : " As 
much company as I have kept, and as much as I love 
it, I love reading better, and would rather be employed 
in reading, than in the most agreeable conversation." 
Pope's conversation, as preserved by Spence, was sen- 
sible*; and it would seem that he had never said but 
one witty thing in his whole life, for only one has been 



CONVERSATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 131 

recorded. It was ingeniously said of Vaucanson, that 
he was as much an automaton as any which he made. 
Hogarth and Swift, who looked on the circles of 
society with eyes of inspiration, were absent in com- 
pany ; but their grossness and asperity did not prevent 
the one from being the greatest of comic painters, nor 
the other as much a creator of manners in his way. 
Genius, even in society, is pursuing its own operations, 
and it would cease to be itself, were it always to act 
like others. 

Men of genius who are habitually eloquent, who 
have practised conversation as an art, for some even 
sacrifice their higher pursuits to this perishable art of 
acting, have indeed excelled, and in the most opposite 
manner. Horne Tooke finely discriminates the wit in 
conversation of Sheridan and Curran, after having 
passed an evening in their company. " Sheridan's 
wit was like steel highly polished and sharpened for 
display and use ; Curran's was a mine of virgin gold, 
incessantly crumbling away from its own richness." 
Charles Butler, whose Reminiscences of his illustrious 
contemporaries are derived from personal intercourse, 
has correctly described the familiar conversations of 
Pitt, Fox, and Burke : " The most intimate friends 
of Mr. Fox complained of his too frequent ruminating 
silence. Mr. Pitt talked, and his talk was fascinating. 
Mr. Burke's conversation was rambling, but splendid 
and instructive beyond comparison." Let me add, that 
the finest genius of our times, is also the most delightful 
man ; he is that rarest among the rare of human beings, 
whom to have known is nearly to adore ; whom to 
have seen, to have heard, forms an era in our life ; 
k2 



132 CONVERSATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 

whom youth remembers with enthusiasm, and whose 
presence the men and women of " the world " feel like 
a dream from which they would not awaken. His 
bonhommie attaches our hearts to him by its simplicity; 
his legendary conversation makes us, for a moment, 
poets like himself *. 

But that deficient agreeableness in social life with 
which men of genius have been often reproached, may 
really result from the nature of those qualities which 
conduce to the greatness of their public character. A 
thinker whose mind is saturated with knowledge on a 
particular subject, will be apt to deliver himself autho- 
ritatively ; but he will then pass for a dogmatist : 
should he hesitate, that he may correct an equivocal 
expression, or bring nearer a remote idea, he is in dan- 
ger of sinking into pedantry or rising into genius. Even 
the fulness of knowledge has its tediousness. " It is 
rare," says Malebranche, " that those who meditate 
profoundly, can explain well the objects they have me- 
ditated on ; for they hesitate when they have to speak ; 
they are scrupulous to convey false ideas or use inaccu- 
rate terms. They do not choose to speak, like others, 
merely for the sake of talking." A vivid and sudden 
perception of truth, or.a severe scrutiny after it, may 
elevate the voice, and burst with an irruptive heat on 
the subdued tone of conversation. ' These men are too 
much in earnest for the weak or the vain. Such serious- 
ness kills their feeble animal spirits. Smeaton, a 

* This was written under the inspiration of a night's conversation, 
or rather listening to Sir Walter Scott. — I cannot bring myself to 
erase what now, alas' has closed in the silence of a swift termination of 
his glorious existence. 



^■MMMHH 



CONVERSATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 133 

creative genius of his class, had a warmth of expression 
which seemed repulsive to many : it arose from an 
intense application of mind, which impelled him to 
break out hastily when anything was said that did not 
accord with his ideas. Persons who are obstinate till 
they can give up their notions with a safe conscience, 
are troublesome intimates. Often too the cold tardiness 
of decision is only the strict balancing of scepticism or 
candour, while obscurity as frequently may arise from 
the deficiency of previous knowledge in the listener. It 
was said that Newton in conversation did not seem to 
understand his own writings, and it was supposed that 
his memory had decayed. The fact, ho »vever, was not 
so ; and Pemberton makes a curious distinction, which 
accounts for Newton not always being ready to speak on 
subjects of which he was the sole master. " Inventors 
seem to treasure up in their own minds what they have 
found out, after another manner than those do the same 
things that have not this inventive faculty. The former, 
when they have occasion to produce their knowledge, 
in some means are obliged immediately to investigate 
part of what they want. For this they are not equally 
fit at all times ; and thus it has often happened, that 
such as retain things chiefly by means of a very strong 
memory, have appeared off-hand more expert than the 
discoverers themselves." 

A peculiar characteristic in the conversations of men 
of genius, which has often injured them when the 
listeners were not intimately acquainted with the men, 
are those sports of a vacant mind, those sudden impulses 
to throw out paradoxical opinions, and to take unex- 
pected views of things in some humour of the moment. 



134 CONVERSATIONS OP MEN OF GENIUS. 

These fanciful and capricious ideas are the grotesque 
images of a playful mind, and are at least as frequently 
misrepresented as they are misunderstood. But thus 
the cunning Philistines are enabled to triumph over the 
strong and gifted man, because in the hour of confi- 
dence, and in the abandonment of the mind, he had 
laid his head in the lap of wantonness, and taught 
them how he might be shorn of his strength. Dr. 
Johnson appears often to have indulged this amuse- 
ment, both in good and ill humour. Even such a calm 
philosopher as Adam Smith, as well as such a child of 
imagination as Burns, were remarked for this ordinary 
habit of men of genius ; which perhaps as often ori- 
ginates in a gentle feeling of contempt for their auditors, 
as from any other cause. Many years after having 
written the above, I discovered two recent confessions 
which confirm the principle. A literary character, the 
late Dr. Leyden, acknowledged, that "In conversation 
I often verge so nearly on absurdity, that I know it is 
perfectly easy to misconceive me, as well as to misre- 
present me." And Miss Edgeworth, in describing her 
father's conversation, observes, that "His openness went 
too far, almost to imprudence ; exposing him not only 
to be misrepresented, but to be misunderstood. Those 
who did not know him intimately, often took literally 
what was either said in sport, or spoken with the 
intention of making a strong impression for some good 
purpose." Cumberland, whose conversation was de- 
lightful, happily describes the species I have noticed. 
" Nonsense talked by men of wit and understanding in 
the hour of relaxation, is of the very finest essence of 
conviviality, and a treat delicious to those who have 



CONVERSATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 135 

the sense to comprehend it ; but it implies a trust in 
the company not always to be risked." The truth is, 
that many, eminent for their o-enius, have been remark - 
able in society for a simplicity and playfulness almost 
infantine. Such was the gaiety of Hume, such the 
bonhommie of Fox ; and one who had long lived in a 
circle of men of genius in the last age, was disposed to 
consider this infantine simplicity as characteristic of 
genius. It is a solitary grace, which can never lend its 
charm to a man of the world, whose purity of mind has 
long been lost in a hacknied intercourse with everything 
exterior to himself. 

But above all, what most offends, is that freedom of 
opinion which a man of genius can no more divest him- 
self of, than of the features of his face. But what if 
this intractable obstinacy be only resistance of cha- 
racter ? Burns never could account to himself why, 
" though when he had a mind he was pretty generally 
beloved, he could never get the art of commanding 
respect," and imagined it was owing to his deficiency 
in what Sterne calls " that understrapping virtue of 
discretion;" "I am so apt to a lapsus linguce" says 
this honest sinner. Amidst the stupidity of a formal 
circle, and the inanity of triflers, however such men 
may conceal their impatience, one of them has forcibly 
described the reaction of this suppressed feeling : " The 
force with which it burst out when the pressure was 
taken off, gave the measure of the constraint which 
had been endured." Eras3IUS, that learned and charm- 
ing writer, who was blest with the genius which could 
enliven a folio, has well described himself, sum naturd 
propensior ad jocos quam fortasse deceat: — more consti- 



136 SLOW-MINDED MEN NOT THE DULLEST. 

tutionally inclined to pleasantry than, as he is pleased 
to add, perhaps became him. We know in his inti- 
macy with Sir Thomas More, that Erasmus was a most 
exhilarating companion ; yet in his intercourse with the 
great he was not fortunate. At the first glance he saw 
through affectation and parade, his praise of folly was 
too ironical, and his freedom carried with it no plea- 
santry for those who knew not to prize a laughing 



In conversation, the operations of the intellect with 
some are habitually slow, but there will be found no 
difference between the result of their perceptions, and 
those of a quicker nature ; and hence it is, that slow- 
minded men are not, as men of the world imagine, 
always the dullest. Nicolle said of a scintillant wit, 
" He vanquishes me in the drawing-room, but surren- 
ders to me at discretion on the stairs." Many a great 
wit has thought the wit it was too late to speak, and 
many a great reasoner has only reasoned when his 
opponent has disappeared. Conversation with such 
men is a losing game ; and it is often lamentable to 
observe, how men of genius are reduced to a state of 
helplessness from not commanding their attention, while 
inferior intellects habitually are found to possess what 
is called " a ready mind." For this reason some, as it 
were in despair, have shut themselves up in silence. A 
lively Frenchman, in describing the distinct sorts of 
conversation of his literary friends, among whom was 
Dr. Franklin, energetically hits off that close observer 
and thinker, wary, even in society, by noting down. 
" the silence of the celebrated Franklin." We learn 
from Cumberland, that Lord Mansfield did not promote 



SLOW-MINDED MEN NOT THE DULLEST. 137 

that conversation which gave him any pains to carry- 
on. He resorted to society for simple relaxation, and 
could even find a pleasure in dulness when accompanied 
with placidity. " It was a kind of cushion to his under- 
standing," observes the wit. Chaucer, like La Fon- 
taine, was more facetious in his tales than in his 
conversation ; for the Countess of Pembroke used to 
rally him, observing that his silence was more agree- 
able to her than his talk. Tasso's conversation, which 
his friend Manso has attempted to preserve for us, was 
not agreeable. In company he sat absorbed in thought, 
with a melancholy air; and it was on one of these 
occasions, that a person present observing that this 
conduct was indicative of madness, that Tasso, who 
had heard him, looking on him without emotion, asked 
whether he was ever acquainted with a madman who 
knew to hold his tongue ? Malebranche tells us 
that one of these mere men of learning, who can only 
venture to praise antiquity, once said, " I have seen 
Descartes; I knew him, and frequently have con- 
versed with him : he was a good sort of man, and was 
not wanting in sense, but he had nothing extraordinary 
in him." Had Aristotle spoken French instead of 
Greek, and had this man frequently conversed with 
him, unquestionably he would not have discovered, even 
in this idol of antiquity, anything extraordinary. Two 
thousand years would have been wanting for our learned 
critic's perceptions. 

It is remarkable that the conversationists have rarely 
jJroved to be the abler writers. He whose fancy is sus- 
ceptible of excitement in the presence of his auditors, 
making the minds of men run with his own, seizing on 



138 CONVERSATIONISTS NOT 

the first impressions, and touching the shadows and 
outlines of things — with a memory where all lies ready 
at hand, quickened by habitual associations, and varying 
with all those extemporary changes and fugitive colours 
which melt away in the rainbow of conversation ; with 
that wit, which is only wit in one place, and for a time; 
with that vivacity of animal spirits, which often exists 
separately from the more retired intellectual powers — 
this man can strike out wit by habit, and pour forth a 
stream of phrase which has sometimes been imagined to 
require only to be written down, to be read with the same 
delight with which it was heard ; but he cannot print 
his tone, nor his air and manner, nor the contagion of 
his hardihood. All the while we were not sensible of 
the flutter of his ideas, the incoherence of his transitions, 
his vague notions, his doubtful assertions, and his 
meagre knowledge. A pen is the extinguisher of this 
luminary. 

A curious contrast occurred between Buffon and his 
friend Montbelliard, who was associated in his great 
work. The one possessed the reverse qualities of the 
other : Buffon, whose style in his composition is ela- 
borate and declamatory, was in conversation coarse and 
careless. Pleading that conversation with him was only 
a relaxation, he rather sought than avoided the idiom 
and the slang of the mob, when these seemed expressive 
and facetious ; while Montbelliard threw every charm 
of animation over his delightful talk : but when he took 
his seat at the rival desk of Buffon, an immense interval 
separated them ; he whose tongue dropped the honey 
and the music of the bee, handled a pen of iron ; while 
Buffon's was the soft pencil of the philosophical painter 



THE ABLEST WRITERS. 139 

of nature. Cowley and Killegrew furnish another 
instance. Cowley was embarrassed in conversation, 
and had no quickness in argument or reply : a mind 
pensive and elegant could not be struck at to catch fire : 
while with Killegrew the sparkling bubbles of his 
fancy rose and dropped. When the delightful conver- 
sationist wrote, the deception ceased. Denham, who 
knew them both, hit off the difference between them : 

" Had Cowley ne'er spoke, Killegrew ne'er writ, 
Combin'd in one they had made a matchless wit." 

Not, however, that a man of genius does not throw 
out many things in conversation which have only been 
found admirable when the public possessed them. The 
public often widely differ from the individual, and a 
century's opinion may intervene between them. The 
fate of genius is sometimes that of the Athenian sculptor, 
who submitted his colossal Minerva to a private party 
for inspection. Before the artist they trembled for his 
daring chisel, and the man of genius smiled ; behind 
him they calumniated, and the man of genius forgave. 
Once fixed in a public place, in the eyes of the whole 
city, the statue was the Divinity ! There is a certain 
distance at which opinions, as well as statues, must be 
viewed. 

But enough of those defects of men of genius which 
often attend their conversations. Must we then bow to 
authorial dignity, and kiss hands, because they are 
inked ? Must we bend to the artist, who considers us 
as nothing unless we are canvass or marble under his 
hands ? Are there not men of genius, the grace of 
society, and the charm of their circle ? Fortunate men ! 
more blest than their brothers ; but for this, they are 



140 CONVERSATIONS OF GENIUS CONSIST 

not the more men of genius, nor the others less. To 
how many of the ordinary intimates of a superior genius, 
who complain of his defects, might one say, "Do his 
productions not delight and sometimes surprise you ? — 
You are silent ! I beg your pardon ; the public has 
informed you of a great name ; you would not other- 
wise have perceived the precious talent of your neigh- 
bour : you know little of your friend but his name." 
The personal familiarity of ordinary minds with a man 
of genius has often produced a ludicrous prejudice. A 
Scotchman, to whom the name of a Dr. Robertson had 
travelled down, was curious to know who he was ? — 
" Your neighbour !" — But he could not persuade himself 
that the man whom he conversed with was the great 
historian of his country. Even a good man could not 
believe in the announcement of the Messiah, from the 
same sort of prejudice : " Can there anything good come 
out of Nazareth V 

Suffer a man of genius to be such as nature and habit 
have formed him, and he will then be the most interest- 
ing companion ; then will you see nothing but his 
character. Akenside, in conversation with select friends, 
often touched by a romantic enthusiasm, would pass in 
review those eminent ancients whom he loved ; he 
imbued with his poetic faculty even the details of their 
lives ; and seemed another Plato while he poured 
libations to their memory in the language of Plato, 
among those whose studies and feelings were congenial 
with his own. Romney, with a fancy entirely his own, 
would give vent to his effusions, uttered in a hurried 
accent and elevated tone, and often accompanied by 
tears, to which by constitution he was prone ; thus 



OF ASSOCIATIONS WITH ITS PURSUITS. 141 

Cumberland, from personal intimacy, describes the 
conversation of this man of genius. Even the tempe- 
rate sensibility of Hume was touched by the bursts of 
feeling of Rousseau ; who, he says, " in conversation 
kindles often to a degree of heat which looks like inspi- 
ration." Barry, that unhappy genius ! was the most 
repulsive of men in his exterior. The vehemence of his 
language, the wildness of his glance, his habit of intro- 
ducing vulgar oaths, which, by some unlucky association 
of habit, served him as expletives and interjections, 
communicated even a horror to some. A pious and a 
learned lady, who had felt intolerable uneasiness in his 
presence, did not however leave this man of genius that 
very evening without an impression that she had never 
heard so divine a man in her life. The conversation 
happening to turn on that principle of benevolence 
which pervades Christianity, and on the meekness of 
the Founder, it gave Barry an opportunity of opening 
on the character of Jesus, with that copiousness of heart 
and mind, which once heard could never be forgotten. 
That artist indeed had long in his meditations an ideal 
head of Christ, which he was always talking of execut- 
ing : " It is here !" he would cry, striking his head. 
That which baffled the invention, as we are told, of 
Leonardo da Vinci, who left his Christ headless, having 
exhausted his creative faculty among the apostles, this 
imaginative picture of the mysterious union of a divine 
and human nature, never ceased, even when conversing, 
to haunt the reveries of Barry. 

There are few authors and artists who are not elo- 
quently instructive on that class of knowledge, or that 
department of art, which reveals the mastery of their 



142 CONVERSATIONS OF GENIUS CONSIST 

life. Their conversations of this nature, affect the mind 
to a distant period of life. Who, having listened to such, 
has forgotten what a man of genius has said at such 
moments ? Who dwells not on the single thought, or 
the glowing expression, stamped in the heat of the 
moment, which came from its source ? Then the mind 
of genius rises as the melody of the iEolian harp, when 
the winds suddenly sweep over the strings — it comes 
and goes — and leaves a sweetness beyond the harmonies 
of art. 

The Miscellanea of Politian are not only the result 
of his studies in the rich library of Lorenzo de Medici, 
but of conversations, which had passed in those rides 
which Lorenzo, accompanied by Politian, preferred to the 
pomp of cavalcades. When the Cardinal de Cabassolle 
strayed with Petrarch about his valley in many a 
wandering discourse, they sometimes extended their 
walks to such a distance, that the servant sought them 
in vain to announce the dinner-hour, and found them 
returning in the evening. When Helvetius enjoyed 
the social conversation of a literary friend, he described 
it as " a chase of ideas." Such are the literary conver- 
sations which Horne Tooke alluded to, when he said 
" I assure you, we find more difficulty to finish than to 
begin our conversations." 

The natural and congenial conversations of men of 
letters and of artists, must then be those which are 
associated with their pursuits, and these are of a differ- 
ent complexion with the talk of men of the world, the 
objects of which are drawn from the temporary passions 
of party-men, or the variable on dits of triflers — 
topics studiously rejected from these more tranquillising 



OF ASSOCIATIONS WITH ITS PURSUITS. 143 

conversations. Diamonds can only be polished by their 
own dust, and are only shaped by the friction of other 
diamonds; and so it happens with literary men and 
artists. 

A meeting of this nature has been recorded by 
Cicero, which himself and Atticus had with Yarro 
in the country. Yarro arriving from Rome in their 
neighbourhood somewhat fatigued, had sent a messenger 
to his friends. " As soon as we had heard these 
tidings," says Cicero, " we could not delay hastening to 
see one, who was attached to us by the same pursuits 
and by former friendship." They set off, but found 
Yarro half-way, urged by the same eager desire to join 
them. They conducted him to Cicero's villa. Here 
while Cicero was inquiring after the news of Rome, 
Atticus interrupted the political rival of Caesar, observ- 
ing, " Let us leave off inquiring after things which 
cannot be heard without pain. Rather ask about what 
we know, for Yarro' s muses are longer silent than they 
used to be, yet surely he has not forsaken them, but 
rather conceals what he writes." — " By no means !" 
replied Yarro, " for I deem him to be a whimsical man 
to write what he wishes to suppress. I have indeed a 
great work in hand (on the Latin language), long de- 
signed for Cicero." The conversation then took its 
natural turn by Atticus having got rid of the political 
anxiety of Cicero. Such, too, were the conversations 
which passed at the literary residence of the Medici 
family ; which was described, with as much truth as 
fancy, as " the Lyceum of philosophy, the Arcadia of 
poets, and the Academy of painters." We have a 
pleasing instance of such a meeting of literary friends in 



144 CONVERSATIONS OF GENIUS. 

those conversations which passed in Pope's garden, 
where there was often a remarkable union of nobility 
and literary men. There Thomson, Mallet, Gay, 
Hooke, and Glover, met Cobham, Bathurst, Chester- 
field, Lyttelton, and other lords ; there some of these 
poets found patrons, and Pope himself discovered critics. 
The contracted views of Spence have unfortunately not 
preserved these literary conversations, but a curious 
passage has dropped from the pen of Lord Bolingbroke, 
in what his lordship calls " a letter to Pope," often pro- 
bably passed over among his political tracts. It breathes 
the spirit of those delightful conversations. " My 
thoughts," writes his lordship, *' in what order soever 
they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they 
pass through my mind ; just as they used to be when 
we conversed together on these or any other subject; 
when we sauntered alone, or as we have often done with 
good Arbuthnot, and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick, 
among the multiplied scenes of your little garden. That 
theatre is large enough for my ambition." Such a scene 
opens a beautiful subject for a curious portrait-painter. 
These literary groups in the gardens of Pope, saunter- 
ing, or divided in confidential intercourse, would furnish 
a scene of literary repose and enjoyment, among some 
of the most illustrious names in our literature. 



LITERARY SOLITUDE. 145 



CHAPTER X. 

Literary solitude. — Its necessity. — Its pleasures Of visitors by 

profession. — Its inconveniences. 

The literary character is reproached with an extreme 
passion for retirement, cultivating those insulating habits 
which while they are great interruptions, and even 
weakeners, of domestic happiness, induce at the same 
time in public life to a secession from its cares, and an 
avoidance of its active duties. Yet the vacancies of 
retired men are eagerly filled by the many unemployed 
men of the world more happily framed for its busi- 
ness. We do not hear these accusations raised against 
the painter who wears away his days at his easel, or 
the musician by the side of his instrument ; and much 
less should we against the legal and the commercial 
character ; yet all these are as much withdrawn from 
public and private life as the literary character. The 
desk is as insulating as the library. Yet the man 
who is working for his individual interest, is more 
highly estimated than the retired student, whose dis- 
interested pursuits are at least more profitable to the 
world than to himself. La Bruyere discovered the 
world's erroneous estimate of literary labour : " There 
requires a better name," he says, " to be bestowed on 
the leisure (the idleness he calls it) of the literary cha- 
racter, — to meditate, to compose, to read and to be tran- 

L 



146 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 

quil, should be called working." But so invisible is the 
progress of intellectual pursuits, and so rarely are the 
objects palpable to the observers, that the literary- 
character appears to be denied for his pursuits, what 
cannot be refused to every other. That unremitting 
application and unbroken series of their thoughts, ad- 
mired in every profession, is only complained of in that 
one whose professors with so much sincerity mourn over 
the brevity of life, which has often closed on them while 
sketching their works. 

It is, however, only in solitude that the genius of 
eminent men has been formed. There their first 
thoughts sprang, and there it will become them to find 
their last : for the solitude of old age — and old age must 
be often in solitude — may be found the happiest with 
the literary character. Solitude is the nurse of enthu- 
siasm, and enthusiasm is the true parent of genius. In 
all ages solitude has been called for — has been flown to. 
No considerable work was ever composed, till its author, 
like an ancient magician, first retired to the grove, or 
to the closet, to invocate. When genius languishes in 
an irksome solitude among crowds, that is the moment 
to fly into seclusion and meditation. There is a society 
in the deepest solitude ; in all the men of genius of the 
past 

" First of your kind, Society divine ! " 

and in themselves ; for there only can they indulge in 
the romances of their soul, and there only can they 
occupy themselves in their dreams and their vigils, and, 
with the morning, fly without interruption to the labour 
they had reluctantly quitted. If there be not periods 






NECESSITY OF SOLITUDE. 147 

when they shall allow their days to melt harmoniously 
into each other, if they do not pass whole weeks toge- 
ther in their study, without intervening absences, they 
will not be admitted into the last recess of the Muses. 
Whether their glory come from researches, or from 
enthusiasm, Time, with not a feather ruffled on his 
wings, Time alone opens discoveries and kindles medita- 
tion. This desert of solitude, so vast and so dreary to 
the man of the world, to the man of genius is the 
magical garden of Armida, whose enchantments arose 
amidst solitude, while solitude was everywhere among 
those enchantments. 

Whenever Michael Angelo, that " divine mad- 
man," as Richardson once wrote on the back of one of 
his drawings, was meditating on some great design, he 
closed himself up from the world. " Why do you lead 
so solitary a life ?" asked a friend. " Art," replied the 
sublime artist, " Art is a jealous god ; it requires the 
whole and entire man." During his mighty labour in 
the Sistine Chapel, he refused to have any communica- 
tion with any person even at his own house. Such 
undisturbed and solitary attention is demanded even by 
undoubted genius . as the price of performance. How 
then shall we deem of that feebler race who exult in 
occasional excellence, and who so often deceive them- 
selves by mistaking the evanescent flashes of genius for 
that holier flame which burns on its altar, because the 
fuel is incessantly supplied ? 

We observe men of genius, in public situations, 

sighing for this solitude. Amidst the impediments of 

the world, they are doomed to view their intellectual 

banquet often rising before them, like some fairy 

l2 



148 PLEASURES OP SOLITUDE. 

delusion, never to taste it. The great Verulam often 
complained of the disturbances of his public life, and 
rejoiced in the occasional .retirement he stole from 
public affairs. " And now, because I am in the country, 
I will send you some of my country fruits, which with 
me are good meditations ; when I am in the city, they 
are choked with business." Lord Clarendon, whose 
life so happily combined the contemplative with the 
active powers of man, dwells on three periods of retire- 
ment which he enjoyed ; he always took pleasure in 
relating the great tranquillity of spirit experienced 
during his solitude at Jersey, where for more than two 
years, employed on his History, he daily wrote " one 
sheet of large paper with his own hand." At the close 
of his life, his literary labours in his other retirements 
are detailed with a proud satisfaction. Each of his 
solitudes occasioned a new acquisition ; to one he owed 
the Spanish, to another the French, and to a third the 
Italian literature. The public are not yet acquainted 
with the fertility of Lord Clarendon's literary labours. 
It was not vanity that induced Scipio to declare of 
solitude, that it had no loneliness for him, since he 
voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his Lin- 
ternum. Cicero was uneasy amid applauding Rome, 
and has distinguished his numerous works by the titles 
of his various villas. Aulus Gellius marked his 
solitude by his " Attic Nights." The " Golden Grove" 
of Jeremy Taylor is the produce of his retreat at the 
Earl of Carberry's seat in "Wales ; and the " Diversions 
of Purley" preserved a man of genius for posterity. 
Voltaire had talents, well adapted for society ; but 
at one period of his life he passed five years in the most 



INTERRUPTIONS FROM VISITORS. 149 

secret seclusion, and indeed usually lived in retirement. 
Montesquieu quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for 
his books and his meditations, and was ridiculed by the 
gay triflers he deserted ; " but my great work/' he 
observes in triumph, " avance a pas de geant." Har- 
rington, to compose his Oceana, severed himself from 
the society of his friends. Descartes, inflamed by 
genius, hires an obscure house in an unfrequented 
quarter at Paris, and there he passes two years, 
unknown to his acquaintance. Adam Smith, after the 
publication of his first work, withdrew into a retire- 
ment that lasted ten years : even Hume rallies him for 
separating himself from the world ; but by this means 
the great political inquirer satisfied the world by his 
great work. And thus it was with men of genius, long 
ere Petrarch withdrew to his Yal chiusa. 

The interruption of visitors by profession has been 
feelingly lamented by men of letters. The mind, 
maturing its speculations, feels the unexpected conver- 
sation of cold ceremony, chilling as March winds over 
the blossoms of the Spring. Those unhappy beings who 
wander from house to house, privileged by the charter 
of society to obstruct the knowledge they cannot impart, 
to weary because they are wearied, or to seek amuse- 
ment at the cost of others, belong to that class of 
society which have affixed no other idea to time than 
that of getting rid of it. These are judges not the best 
qualified to comprehend the nature and evil of their 
depredations in the silent apartment of the studious, 
who may be often driven to exclaim, in the words of 
the Psalmist, " Yerily I have cleansed my heart in 
vain, and washed my hands in innocency ; for all the 



150 INTERRUPTIONS FROM VISITORS. 

day long have I been plagued^ and chastened every 
morning." 

When Montesquieu was deeply engaged in his 
great work, he writes to a friend : — " The favour which 
your friend Mr. Hein often does me to pass his mornings 
with me, occasions great damage to my work as well 
by his impure French, as the length of his details." — 
" We are afraid," said some of those visitors to Baxter, 
" that we break in upon your time." — " To be sure you 
do," replied the disturbed and blunt scholar. To hint 
as gently as he could to his friends that he was avari- 
cious of time, one of the learned Italians had a promi- 
nent inscription over the door of his study, intimating 
that whoever remained there must join in his labours. 
The amiable Melancthon, incapable of a harsh expres- 
sion, when he received these idle visits, only noted down 
the time he had expended, that he might reanimate his 
industry, and not lose a day. Evelyn, continually 
importuned by morning visitors, or " taken up by other 
impertinencies of my life in the country," stole his hours 
from his night-rest " to redeem his losses." The literary 
character has been driven to the most inventive shifts to 
escape the irruption of a formidable party at a single rush, 
who enter, without " besieging or beseeching," as Milton 
has it. The late Mr. Ellis, a man of elegant tastes and 
poetical temperament, on one of these occasions, at 
his country-house, assured a literary friend, that when 
driven to the last, he usually made his escape by a leap 
out of the window ; and Boileau has noticed a similar 
dilemma when at the villa of the President Lamoignon, 
while they were holding their delightful conversations 
in his grounds. 



INCONVENIENCES OF SOLITUDE. 151 

" Quelquefois de facheux arrivent trois volees, 
Que du pare a l'instant assi£gent les allees ; 
Alors sauve qui peut, et quatrefois heureux 
Qui sait s'echapper, a, quelque autre ignor£ d'eux." 

Brand Hollis endeavoured to hold out " the idea of 
singularity as a shield;" and the great Robert Boyle 
was compelled to advertise in a newspaper that he 
must decline visits on certain days, that he might have 
leisure to finish some of his works*. 

Boccaccio has given an interesting account of the 
mode of life of the studious Petrarch, for on a visit 
he found that Petrarch would not suffer his hours of 
study to be broken into even by the person whom of 
all men he loved most, and did not quit his morning 
studies for his guest, who during that time occupied 
himself by reading or transcribing the works of his 
master. At the decline of day Petrarch quitted his 
study for his garden, where he delighted to open his 
heart in mutual confidence. 

But this solitude, at first a necessity, and then a 
pleasure, at length is not borne without repining. To . 
tame the fervid wildness of youth to the strict regu- 
larities of study, is a sacrifice performed by the votary ; 
but even Milton appears to have felt this irksome 
period of life ; for in the preface to Smectymnuus he 
says : — " It is but justice not to defraud of due esteem 
the wearisome labours and studious watchings wherein 
I have spent and tired out almost a whole youth." 
Cowley, that enthusiast for seclusion, in his retirement 
calls himself " the Melancholy Cowley." I have seen 

* This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch's Life of 
Boyle, p. 272. 



152 INCONVENIENCES OF SOLITUDE. 

an original letter of this poet to Evelyn, where he 
expresses his eagerness to see Sir George Mackenzie's 
Essay on Solitude ; for a copy of which he had sent 
over the town, without obtaining one, being " either all 
bought up, or burnt in the fire of London." — " I am 
the more desirous," he says, " because it is a subject in 
which I am most deeply interested." Thus Cowley 
was requiring a book to confirm his predilection, and 
we know he made the experiment, which did not prove 
a happy one. We find even Gibbon, with all his 
fame about him, anticipating the dread he entertained 
of solitude in advanced life. " I feel, and shall con- 
tinue to feel, that domestic solitude, however it may be 
alleviated by the world, by study, and even by friend- 
ship, is a comfortless state, which will grow more painful 
as I descend in the vale of years." And again : — " Your 
visit has only served to remind me that man, however 
amused or occupied in his closet, was not made to live 
alone." 

Had the mistaken notions of Sprat not deprived us 
of Cowley's correspondence, we doubtless had viewed 
the picture of lonely genius touched by a tender pencil. 
But we have Shenstone, and Gray, and Swift. The 
heart of Shenstone bleeds in the dead oblivion of 
solitude : — " Now I am come from a visit, every little 
uneasiness is sufficient to introduce my whole train of 
melancholy considerations, and to make me utterly dis- 
satisfied with the life I now lead, and the life I foresee 
I shall lead. I am angry, and envious, and dejected, 
and frantic, and disregard all present things, as becomes 
a madman to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is 
a gloomy joy, with the application of Dr. Swift's com- 



INCONVENIENCES OF SOLITUDE. 153 

plaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, like a rat in a 
poisoned hole." Let the lover of solitude muse on its 
picture throughout the year, in this stanza, by the same 
amiable but suffering poet : — 

Tedious again to curse the drizzling day, 

Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow, 
Or, soothed by vernal airs, again survey 

The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow. 

Swift's letters paint with terrifying colours a picture 
of solitude • and at length his despair closed with 
idiotism. Even the playful muse of Gresset throws a 
sombre querulousness over the solitude of men of 
genius : — 

Je les vois, victimes du g&trie, 

Au foible prix d'un eclat passager, 
Vivre isol£s, sans jouir de la vie ! 
Yingt ans d'ennuis pour quelques jours de gloire. 

Such are the necessity, the pleasures, and the incon- 
veniences of solitude ! It ceases to be a question, 
whether men of genius should blend with the masses of 
society ; for whether in solitude, or in the world, of 
all others they must learn to live with themselves. It 
is in the world that they borrow the sparks of thought 
that fly upwards and perish ; but the flame of genius 
can only be lighted in their own solitary breast. 



154 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 






CHAPTER XI. 

The meditations of genius. — A work on the art of meditation not yet 
produced. — Predisposing the mind. — Imagination awakens imagina- 
tion. — Generating feelings by music. — Slight habits. — Darkness 
and silence, by suspending the exercise of our senses, increase the 
vivacity of our conceptions. — The arts of memory. — Memory the 
foundation of genius. — Inventions by several to preserve their own 
moral and literary character — And to assist their studies. — The 
meditations of genius depend on habit. — Of the night-time. — A day 
of meditation should precede a day of composition. — Works of 
magnitude from slight conceptions. — Of thoughts never written. — 
The art of meditation exercised at all hours and places. — Continuity 
of attention the source of philosophical discoveries. — Stillness of 
meditation the first state of existence in genius. 

A continuity of attention, a patient quietness of 
mind, forms one of the characteristics of genius. To 
think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of 
men of genius — the men of reasoning and the men of 
imagination. There is a thread in our thoughts, as 
there is a pulse in our hearts ; he who can hold the 
one, knows how to think, and he who can move the 
other, knows how to feel. 

A work on the art of meditation has not yet been 
produced ; yet such a work might prove of immense 
advantage to him who never happened to have more 
than one solitary idea. The pursuit of a single prin- 
ciple has produced a great system. Thus probably we 
owe Adam Smith to the French economists. And a 
loose hint has conducted to a new discovery. Thus 
Girard, taking advantage of an idea first started by 



ON PREDISPOSING THE MIND. 155 

Fenelon, produced his " Synonymes." But while, in 
every manual art, every great workman improves on 
his predecessor, of the art of the mind, notwithstanding 
the facility of practice, and our incessant experience, 
millions are yet ignorant of the first rudiments ; and 
men of genius themselves are rarely acquainted with 
the materials they are working on. Certain constituent 
principles of the mind itself, which the study of meta- 
physics curiously develops, offer many important regu- 
lations in this desirable art. We may even suspect, 
since men of genius in the present age have confided to 
us the secrets of their studies, that this art may be 
carried on by more obvious means than at first would 
appear, and even by mechanical contrivances and prac- 
tical habits. A mind well organised may be regulated 
by a single contrivance, as by a bit of lead we govern 
the fine machinery by which we track the flight of 
time. Many secrets in this art of the mind yet remain 
as insulated facts, which may hereafter enter into an 
experimental history. 

Johnson has a curious observation on the Mind itself. 
He thinks it obtains a stationary point, from whence it 
can never advance, occurring before the middle of life. 
" When the powers of nature have attained their 
intended energy, they can be no more advanced. The 
shrub can never become a tree. Nothing then remains 
but practice and experience ; and perhaps why they do- 
so little, may be worth inquiry*." The result of this 
inquiry would probably lay a broader foundation for 
this art of the mind than we have hitherto possessed. 

* I recommend the reader to turn to the whole passage, in John- 
sou's Letters to Mrs. Thrale, Vol. I. p. 296. 



156 IMAGINATION AWAKENS IMAGINATION. 

Adam Ferguson has expressed himself with sublimity : — 
" The lustre which man casts around him, like the flame 
of a meteor, shines only while his motion continues ; 
the moments of rest and of obscurity are the same." 
What is this art of meditation, but the power of with- 
drawing ourselves from the world, to view that world 
moving within ourselves, while we are in repose ? As 
the artist, by an optical instrument, reflects and con- 
centrates the boundless landscape around him, and 
patiently traces all nature in that small space. 

There is a government of our thoughts. The mind of 
genius can be made to take a particular disposition or 
train of ideas. It is a remarkable circumstance in the 
studies of men of genius, that previous to composition 
they have often awakened their imagination by the 
imagination of their favourite masters. By touching a 
magnet, they became a magnet. A circumstance has 
been recorded of Gray, by Mr. Mathias, " as worthy 
of all acceptation among the higher votaries of the 
divine art, when they are assured that Mr. Gray never 
sate down to compose any poetry without previously, 
and for a considerable time, reading the works of 
Spenser." But the circumstance was not unusual with 
Malherbe, Corneille, and Racine ; and the most fervid 
verses of Homer, and the most tender of Euripides, 
were often repeated by Milton. Even antiquity ex- 
hibits the same exciting intercourse of the mind of 
genius. Cicero informs us how his eloquence caught 
inspiration from a constant study of the Latin and 
Grecian poetry ; and it has been recorded of Pompey, 
who was Great even in his youth, that he never under- 
took any considerable enterprise, without animating his 



FEELINGS GENERATED BY MUSIC. 157 

genius by having read to him the character of Achilles 
in the first Iliad ; although he acknowledged that the 
enthusiasm he caught came rather from the poet than 
the hero. When Bossuet had to compose a funeral 
oration, he was accustomed to retire for several days to 
his study, to ruminate over the pages of Homer ; and 
when asked the reason of this habit, he exclaimed, in 
these lines, 

magnam mihi mentem, animumque 



Delius inspiret Vates. 

It is on the same principle of predisposing the mind, 
that many have first generated their feelings by the 
symphonies of music. Alfieri often before he wrote 
prepared his mind by listening to music : " Almost all 
my tragedies were sketched in my mind either in the 
act of hearing music, or a few hours after" — a circum- 
stance which has been recorded of many others. Lord 
Bacon bad music often played in the room adjoining 
his study : Milton listened to bis organ for his solemn 
inspiration, and music was even necessary to Warbur- 
ton. The symphonies which awoke in the poet sub- 
lime emotions, might have composed the inventive 
mind of the great critic in the visions of his theoretical 
mysteries. A celebrated French preacher, Bourdaloue 
or Massillon, was once found playing on a violin, to 
screw his mind up to the pitch, preparatory for his 
sermon, which within a short interval he was to preach 
before the court. Curran's favourite mode of medita- 
tion was with his violin in his hand ; for hours together 
would he forget himself, running voluntaries over the 
strings, while his imagination in collecting its tones 
was opening all his faculties for the coming emergency 



158 SLIGHT HABITS OF THE MIND. 

at the bar. When Leonardo da Vinci was painting 
his Lisa, commonly called La Joconde, he had musicians 
constantly in waiting, whose light harmonies, by their 
associations, inspired feelings of 

" Tipsy dance and revelry." 

There are slight habits which may be contracted by 
genius, which assist the action of the mind ; but these 
are of a nature so trivial, that they seem ridiculous when 
they have not been experienced : but the imaginative 
race exist by the acts of imagination. Haydn would 
never sit down to compose without being in full dress, 
with his great diamond ring, and the finest paper to 
write down his musical compositions. Rousseau has 
told us, when occupied by his celebrated romance, of 
the influence of the rose-coloured knots of ribbon which 
tied his portfolio, his fine paper, his brilliant ink, and 
his gold sand. Similar facts are related of many. 
Whenever Apostolo Zeno, the predecessor of Metas- 
tasio, prepared himself to compose a new drama, he 
used to say to himself, " Apostolo ! recordati che questa 
e la prima opera che dai in luce." — " Apostolo ! remem- 
ber that this is the first opera you are presenting to the 
public." We are scarcely aware how we may govern 
our thoughts by means of our sensations : De Luc was 
subject to violent bursts of passion ; but he calmed the 
interior tumult by the artifice of filling his mouth with 
sweets and comfits. When Goldoni found his sleep 
disturbed by the obtrusive ideas still floating from the 
studies of the day, he contrived to lull himself to rest 
by conning in his mind a vocabulary of the Venetian 
dialect, translating some word into Tuscan and French; 



OF GOVERNING OUR THOUGHTS. 159 

which being a very uninteresting occupation, at the third 
or fourth version this recipe never failed. This was an 
art of withdrawing attention from the greater to the 
less emotion ; by which, as the interest weakened, the 
excitement ceased. Mendelsohn, whose feeble and too 
sensitive frame was often reduced to the last stage of 
suffering by intellectual exertion, when engaged in any 
point of difficulty, would in an instant contrive a per- 
fect cessation from thinking, by mechanically going to 
the window, and counting the tiles upon the roof of his 
neighbour's house. Such facts show how much art may 
be concerned in the government of our thoughts. 

It is an unquestionable fact, that some profound 
thinkers cannot pursue their intellectual operations 
amidst the distractions of light and noise. With them, 
attention to what is passing within is interrupted by 
the discordant impressions from objects pressing and 
obtruding on the external senses. There are, indeed, 
instances, as in the case of Priestley and others, of 
authors who have pursued their literary works amidst 
conversation and their family; but such minds are not 
the most original thinkers, and the most refined writers; 
or their subjects are of a nature which require little 
more than judgment and diligence. It is the mind only 
in its fullness which can brood over thoughts till the 
incubation produces vitality. Such is the feeling in 
this act of study. In Plutarch's time they showed a 
subterraneous place of study built by Demosthenes, and 
where he often continued for two or three months to- 
gether. Malebranche, Hobbes, Corneille, and others, 
darkened their apartment, when they wrote, to concen- 
trate their thoughts, as Milton says of the mind, " in 



160 DARKNESS AND SILENCE USEFUL. 

the spacious circuits of her musing." It is in propor- 
tion as we can suspend the exercise of all our other 
senses that the liveliness of our conception increases — 
this is the observation of the most elegant metaphysician 
of our times ; and when Lord Chesterfield advised that 
his pupil, whose attention wandered on every passing 
object, which unfitted him for study, should be in- 
structed in a darkened apartment, he was aware of 
this principle ; the boy would learn and retain what he 
learnt ten times as well. We close our eyes whenever 
we would collect our mind together, or trace more dis- 
tinctly an object which seems to have faded away in 
our recollections. The study of an author or an artist 
would be ill placed in the midst of a beautiful land- 
scape ; the Penseroso of Milton, " hid from day's garish 
eye," is the man of genius. A secluded and naked 
apartment, with nothing but a desk, a chair, and a 
single sheet of paper, was for fifty years the study of 
Buffon ; the single ornament was a print of Newton 
placed before his eyes — nothing broke into the unity 
of his reveries. Cumberland's liveliest comedy, " the 
West Indian," was written in an unfurnished apart- 
ment close in front of an Irish turf-stock ; and our 
comic writer was fully aware of the advantages of the 
situation. " In all my hours of study," says that ele- 
gant writer, "it has been through life my object so to 
locate myself as to have little or nothing to distract 
my attention, and therefore, brilliant rooms or pleasant 
prospects I have ever avoided. A dead wall, or as in 
the present case, an Irish turf-stack, are not attractions 
that can call off the fancy from its pursuits ; and whilst 
in these pursuits it can find interest and occupation, it 



ARTS OF MEMORY. 161 

wants no outward aid to cheer it. My father, I believe, 
rather wondered at my choice." The principle ascer- 
tained, the consequences are obvious. 

The arts of memory have at all times excited the 
attention of the studious ; they open a world of un di- 
vulged mysteries, where every one seems to form some 
discovery of his own, rather exciting his astonishment 
than enlarging his comprehension. Le Sage, a modern 
philosopher, had a memory singularly defective. Inca- 
pable of acquiring languages, and deficient in all those 
studies which depend on the exercise of the memory, it 
became the object of his subsequent exertions to supply 
this deficiency by the order and method he observed in 
arranging every new fact or idea he obtained ; so that 
in reality with a very bad memory, it appears that he 
was still enabled to recall at will any idea or any know- 
ledge which he had stored up. John Hunter happily 
illustrated the advantages which every one derives from 
putting his thoughts in writing, " it resembles a trades- 
man taking stock ; without which he never knows either 
what he possesses or in what he is deficient." The late 
William Hutton, a man of an original cast of mind, 
as an experiment in memory, opened a book which he 
had divided into 365 columns, according to the days of 
the year : he resolved to try to recollect an anecdote, for 
every column, as insignificant and remote as he was 
able, rejecting all under ten years of age ; and to his 
surprise, he filled those spaces for small reminiscences, 
within ten columns ; but till this experiment had been 
made, he never conceived the extent of his faculty. 
Wolf, the German metaphysician, relates of himself, 
that he had by the most persevering habit, in bed and 
m 



162 THE ARTS OF MEMORY. 

amidst darkness, resolved his algebraic problems, and 
geometrically composed all his methods merely by the 
aid of his imagination and memory ; and when in the 
day-time he verified the one and the other of these 
operations, he had always found them true. Unques- 
tionably such astonishing instances of a well-regulated 
memory depend on the practice of its art gradually 
formed, by frequent associations. When we reflect, 
that whatever we know, and whatever we feel, are the 
very smallest portions of all the knowledge we have 
been acquiring, and all the feelings we have experienced 
through life, how desirable would be that art, which 
should again open the scenes which have vanished, and 
revivify the emotions which other impressions have 
effaced ? But the faculty of memory, although perhaps 
the most manageable of all others, is considered a subor- 
dinate one ; it seems only a grasping and accumulating 
power, and in the work of genius is imagined to pro- 
duce nothing of itself ; yet is memory the foundation 
of Genius whenever this faculty is associated with 
imagination and passion ; with men of genius it is a 
chronology not merely of events, but of emotions ; hence 
they remember nothing that is not interesting to their 
feelings. Persons of inferior capacity have imperfect 
recollections from feeble impressions. Are not the 
incidents of the great novelist, often founded on the 
common ones of life ? and the personages so admirably 
alive in his fictions, were they not discovered among 
the crowd ? The ancients have described the Muses as 
the daughters of Memory ; an elegant fiction, indicating 
the natural and intimate connexion between imagination 
and reminiscence. 



MEMORY THE FOUNDATION OF GENIUS. 163 

The arts of memory will form a saving bank of genius, 
to which it may have recourse, as a wealth which it 
can accumulate imperceptibly amidst the ordinary 
expenditure. Locke taught us the first rudiments of 
this art, when he showed us how he stored his thoughts 
and his facts, by an artificial arrangement; and Addison, 
before he commenced his Spectators, had amassed three 
folios of materials. But the higher step will be the 
volume which shall give an account of a man to himself, 
in which a single observation immediately becomes a 
clue of past knowledge, restoring to him his lost studies, 
and his evanescent existence. Self-contemplation makes 
the man more nearly entire : and to preserve the past, 
is half of immortality. 

The worth of the diary must depend on the diarist ; 
but " Of the things which concern himself," as Marcus 
Antoninus entitles his celebrated work — this volume 
reserved for solitary contemplation, should be considered 
as a future relic of ourselves. The late Sir Samuel 
Romilly commenced, even in the most occupied period 
of his life, a diary of his last twelve years ; which he 
declares in his will, " I bequeath to my children, as it 
may be serviceable to them." Perhaps in this, Romilly 
bore in mind the example of another eminent lawyer, 
the celebrated AVhitelocke, who had drawn up a great 
work, entitled " Remembrances of the Labours of 
"Whitelocke, in the Annals of his Life, for the Instruc- 
tion of his Children." That neither of these family 
books have appeared, is our common loss. Such legacies 
from such men, ought to become the inheritance of their 
countrymen. 

To register the transactions of the day, with obser- 
m2 



164 MEMORY THE FOUNDATION OF GENIUS. 

vations on what, and on whom, he had seen, was the 
advice of Lord Kaimes to the late Mr. Curwen ; and 
for years his head never reached its pillow without per- 
forming a task which habit had made easy. " Our best 
and surest road to knowledge," said Lord Kaimes, " is 
by profiting from the labours of others, and making their 
experience our own." In this manner Curwen tells us 
he acquired by habit the art of thinking ; and he is an 
able testimony of the practicability and success of the 
plan, for he candidly tells us, " Though many would 
sicken at the idea of imposing such a task upon them- 
selves, yet the attempt, persevered in for a short time, 
would soon become a custom more irksome to omit, than 
it was difficult to commence." 

Could we look into the libraries of authors, the studios 
of artists, and the laboratories of chemists, and view 
what they have only sketched, or what lie scattered in 
fragments, and could we trace their first and last 
thoughts, we might discover that we have lost more 
than we possess. There we might view foundations 
without superstructures, once the monuments of their 
hopes ! A living architect recently exhibited to the 
public an extraordinary picture of his mind, in his 
" Architectural Visions of early fancy in the gay morn- 
ing of youth," and which now were " dreams in the 
evening of life." In this picture he had thrown together 
all the architectural designs his imagination had con- 
ceived, but which remained unexecuted. The feeling is 
true, however whimsical such unaccomplished fancies 
might appear, when thrown together into one picture. 
In literary history such instances have occurred but too 
frequently : the imagination of youth, measuring neither 



MEMORY THE FOUNDATION OF GENIUS. 165 

time nor ability, creates what neither time nor ability 
can execute. Adam Smith, in the preface to the first 
edition of his "Theory of Sentiments," announced a 
large work on law and government; and in a late 
edition he still repeated the promise, observing, that 
" Thirty years ago I entertained no doubt of being able 
to execute every thing which it announced." The 
" Wealth of Nations" was but a fragment of this greater 
work. Surely men of genius, of all others, may mourn 
over the length of art and the brevity of life ! 

Yet many glorious efforts, and even artificial inven- 
tions, have been contrived to assist and save its moral 
and literary existence in that perpetual race which 
genius holds with time. We trace its triumph in the 
studious days of such men as Gibbon, Sir William 
Jones, and Priestley. An invention by which the 
moral qualities and the acquisitions of the literary cha- 
racter were combined and advanced together, is what 
Sir William Jones ingeniously calls his " Andrometer." 
In that scale of human attainments and enjoyments 
which ought to accompany the eras of human life, it 
reminds us of what was to be learned, and what to be 
practised, assigning to stated periods their appropriate 
pursuits. An occasional recurrence, even to so fanciful 
a standard, would be like looking on a clock, to remind 
the student how he loiters, or how he advances in the 
great day's work. Such romantic plans have been 
often invented by the ardour of genius. There was no 
communication between Sir William Jones and Dr. 
Franklin ; yet when young, the self-taught philosopher 
of America pursued the same genial and generous devo- 
tion to his own moral and literary excellence. 



166 INVENTIONS TO PRESERVE 

" It was about this time I conceived," says Franklin, 
"the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral 
perfection," &c. He began a daily journal, in which 
against thirteen virtues accompanied by seven columns 
to mark the days of the week, he dotted down what ho 
considered to be his failures ; he found himself fuller of 
faults than he had imagined, but at length, his blots 
diminished. This self-examination, or this "Fault- 
book," as Lord Shaftesbury would have called it, 
was always carried about him. These books still 
exist. An additional contrivance was that of journal- 
ising his twenty-four hours, of which he has furnished 
us both with descriptions and specimens of the method; 
and he closes with a solemn assurance, that " It may 
be well my posterity should be informed, that to this 
little artifice their ancestor owes the constant felicity of 
his life." Thus we see the fancy of Jones and the 
sense of Franklin, unconnected either by character or 
communication, but acted on by the same glorious feel- 
ing to create their own moral and literary character, 
inventing similar, although extraordinary methods. 

The memorials of Gibbon and Priestley present us 
with the experience and the habits of the Literary 
Character. " What I have known," says Dr. Priestley, 
" with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen 
both my admiration and my contempt of others. Could 
we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, 
and have traced all the steps by which he produced his 
great works, we might see nothing very extraordinary 
in the process." Our student, with an ingenuous sim- 
plicity, opens to us that " variety of mechanical expe- 
dients by which he secured and arranged his thoughts," 



THE MORAL AND LITERARY CHARACTER. 167 

and that discipline of the mind, by means of a peculiar 
arrangement of his studies for the day and for the year, 
in which he rivalled the calm and unalterable system 
pursued by Gibbon, Buffon and Voltaire, who 
often only combined the knowledge they obtained, by 
humble methods. They knew what to ask for; and 
where what is wanted may be found : they made use 
of an intelligent secretary ; aware, as Lord Bacon has 
expressed it, that some books "may be read by de- 
puty." 

Buffon laid down an excellent rule to obtain ori- 
ginality, when he advised the writer first to exhaust 
his own thoughts, before he attempted to consult other 
writers; and Gibbon, the most experienced reader of 
all our writers, offers the same important advice to 
an author. When engaged on a particular subject, he 
tells us, " I suspended my perusal of any new book 
on the subject, till I had reviewed all that I knew, or 
believed, or had thought on it, that I might be qualified 
to discern how much the authors added to my original 
stock." The advice of Lord Bacon, that we should 
pursue our studies in whatever disposition the mind 
may be, is excellent. If happily disposed, we shall 
gain a great step, and if indisposed, we " shall work out 
the knots and strands of the mind, and make the middle 
times the more pleasant." Some active lives have 
passed away in incessant competition, like those of 
Mozart, Cicero, and Voltaire, who were restless, 
perhaps unhappy, when their genius was quiescent. 
To such minds the constant zeal they bring to their 
labour supplies the absence of that inspiration which 
cannot always be the same, nor always at its height. 



168 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS 

Industry is the feature by which the ancients so fre- 
quently describe an eminent character ; such phrases as 
" incredibili industrial diligentia singulari" are usual. 
We of these days cannot conceive the industry of 
Cicero ; but he has himself told us that he suffered no 
moments of his leisure to escape from him. Not only 
his spare hours were consecrated to his books ; but 
even on days of business he would take a few turns in 
his walk, to meditate or to dictate ; many of his letters 
are dated before daylight, some from the senate, at bis 
meals, and amid his morning levees. The dawn of day 
was the summons of study to Sir William Jones. 
John Hunter, who was constantly engaged in the 
search and consideration of new facts, described what 
was passing in his mind by a remarkable illustration : 
he said to Abernethy, " My mind is like a bee-hive." 
A simile which was singularly correct; "for," observes 
Abernethy, " in the midst of buzz and apparent confu- 
sion, there was great order, regularity of structure, and 
abundant food, collected with incessant industry from 
the choicest stores of nature." Thus one man of genius 
is the ablest commentator on the thoughts and feelings 
of another. When we reflect on the magnitude of the 
labours of Cicero, and the elder Pliny, on those of 
Erasmus, Petrarch, Baronius, Lord Bacon, Usher, and 
Bayle, we seem at the base of these monuments of 
study, we seem scarcely awake to admire. These were 
the laborious instructors of mankind ; their age has 
closed. 

Yet let not those other artists of the mind, who work 
in the airy looms of fancy and wit, imagine that they 
are weaving their webs, without the direction of a 



DEPEND ON HABIT. 169 

principle, and without a secret habit which they have 
acquired, and which some have imagined, by its quick- 
ness and facility, to be an instinct. "Habit," says 
Reid, " differs from instinct, not in its nature, but in 
its origin ; the last being natural, the first acquired." 
What we are accustomed to do, gives a facility and 
proneness to do on like occasions ; and there may be 
even an art, unperceived by themselves, in opening and 
pursuing a scene of pure invention, and even in the 
happiest turns of wit. One who had all the experience 
of such an artist has employed the very terms we have 
used, of " mechanical" and " habitual." " Be assured," 
says Goldsmith, " that wit is in some measure mecha- 
nical ; and that a man long habituated to catch at even 
its resemblance, will at last be happy enough to possess 
the substance. By a long habit of writing he acquires 
a justness of thinking, and a mastery of manner, which 
holiday writers, even with ten times his genius, may 
vainly attempt to equal." The wit of Butler was not 
extemporaneous, but painfully elaborated from notes 
which he incessantly accumulated; and the familiar 
rime of Berni the burlesque poet, his existing manu- 
scripts will prove were produced by perpetual re-touches. 
Even in the sublime efforts of imagination, this art of 
meditation may be practised ; and Alfieri has shown 
us, that in those energetic tragic dramas which were 
often produced in a state of enthusiasm, he pursued a 
regulated process. " All my tragedies have been com- 
posed three times ;" and he describes the three stages of 
conception, development, and versifying. " After these 
three operations, I proceed, like other authors, to polish, 
correct, or amend." 



170 OF THE NIGHT-TIME. 

"All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself!" ex- 
claimed Metastasio ; and we may add, even the medi- 
tations of genius. Some of its boldest conceptions are 
indeed fortuitous, starting up and vanishing almost in 
the perception; like that giant form, sometimes seen 
amidst the glaciers, afar from the opposite traveller, 
moving as he moves, stopping as he stops, yet, in a 
moment lost, and perhaps never more seen, although 
but his own reflection ! Often in the still obscurity of 
the night, the ideas, the studies, the whole history of 
the day, is acted over again. There are probably few 
mathematicians who have not dreamed of an interesting 
problem, observes Professor Dugald Stewart. In these 
vivid scenes we are often so completely converted into 
spectators, that a great poetical contemporary of our 
country thinks that even his dreams should not pass 
away unnoticed, and keeps what he calls a register of 
nocturnals. Tasso has recorded some of his poetical 
dreams, which were often disturbed by waking himself 
in repeating a verse aloud. "This night I awaked 
with this verse in my mouth — 

" E i duo che manda il nero adusto suolo." 
" The two, the dark and burning soil has sent." 

He discovered that the epithet black was not suitable; 
" I again fell asleep, and in a dream I read in Strabo 
that the sand of Ethiopia and Arabia is extremely white, 
and this morning I have found the place. You see 
what learned dreams I have." 

But incidents of this nature are not peculiar to this 
great bard. The improvisatori poets, we are told, 
cannot sleep after an evening's effusion; the rhymes 
are still ringing in their ears, and imagination, if they 



OF THE NIGHT-TIME. 17 1 

have any, will still haunt them. Their previous state 
of excitement breaks into the calm of sleep ; for, like 
the ocean, when its swell is subsiding, the waves still 
heave and beat. A poet, whether a Milton or a Black- 
more, will ever find that his muse will visit his u slum- 
bers nightly." His fate is much harder than that of 
the great minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who on retiring 
to rest could throw aside his political intrigues with his 
clothes ; but Sir Robert, to judge by his portrait, and 
anecdotes of him, had a sleekiness and good humour, 
and an unalterable equanimity of countenance, not the 
portion of men of genius : indeed one of these has re- 
gretted that his sleep was so profound as not to be 
interrupted by dreams ; from a throng of fantastic ideas 
he imagined that he could have drawn new sources of 
poetic imagery. The historian De Thou was one of 
those great literary characters, who, all his life, was 
preparing to write the history which he afterwards 
composed ; omitting nothing, in his travels and his em- 
bassies, which went to the formation of a great man, 
De Thou has given a very curious account of his 
dreams. Such was his passion for study, and his ardent 
admiration of the great men whom he conversed with, 
that he often imagined in his sleep that he was travel- 
ling in Italy, in Germany, and in England, where he 
saw and consulted the learned, and examined their 
curious libraries. He had all his life-time these literary 
dreams, but more particularly in his travels, they 
reflected these images of the day. 

If memory do not chain down these hurrying fading 
children of the imagination, and 

" Snatch the faithless fugitives to light " 



172 



THE FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 



with the beams of the morning, the mind suddenly 
finds itself forsaken and solitary. Rousseau has uttered 
a complaint on this occasion. Full of enthusiasm, he 
devoted to the subject of his thoughts, as was his cus- 
tom, the long sleepless intervals of his nights. Medi- 
tating in bed, with his eyes closed, he turned over his 
periods, in a tumult of ideas ; but when he rose and 
had dressed, all was vanished ; and when he sat down 
to his papers, he had nothing to write. Thus genius 
has its vespers and its vigils, as well as its matins, 
which we have been so often told are the true hours of 
its inspiration ; but every hour may be full of inspira- 
tion for him who knows to meditate. No man was 
more practised in this art of the mind than Pope, and 
even the night was not an unregarded portion of his 
poetical existence, not less than with Leonardo da 
Vinci, who tells us how often he found the use of recol- 
lecting the ideas of what he had considered in the day 
after he had retired to bed, encompassed by the silence 
and obscurity of the night. Sleepless nights are the 
portion of genius when engaged in its work ; the train 
of reasoning is still pursued ; the images of fancy catch 
a fresh illumination ; and even a happy expression shall 
linger in the ear of him who turns about for the soft 
composure to which his troubled spirit cannot settle. 

But while with genius so much seems fortuitous, in 
its great operations the march of the mind appears 
regular, and requires preparation. The intellectual 
faculties are not always co-existent, or do not always 
act simultaneously. Whenever any particular faculty 
is highly active, while the others are languid, the work, 
as a work of genius, may be very deficient. Hence the 



WORKS OF MAGNITUDE. 173 

faculties, in whatever degree they exist, are unques- 
tionably enlarged by meditation. It seems trivial to 
observe that meditation should precede composition, 
but we are not always aware of its importance ; the 
truth is, that it is a difficulty unless it be a habit. We 
write, and we find we have written ill ; we re- write, 
and feel we have written well : in the second act of 
composition we have acquired the necessary meditation. 
Still we rarely carry on our meditation so far as its 
practice would enable us. Many works of mediocrity 
might have approached to excellence, had this art of 
the mind been exercised. Many volatile writers might 
have reached even to deep thinking, had they bestowed 
a day of meditation before a day of composition, and 
thus engendered their thoughts. Many productions of 
genius have originally been enveloped in feebleness and 
obscurity, which have only been brought to perfection 
by repeated acts of the mind. There is a maxim of 
Confucius, which in the translation seems quaint, but 
which is pregnant with sense — 

"Labour, but slight not meditation ; 
Meditate, but slight not labour." 

Few works of magnitude presented themselves at 
once, in their extent and with their associations to their 
authors. Two or three striking circumstances, unob- 
served before, are perhaps all which the man of genius 
perceives. It is in revolving the subject that the whole 
mind becomes gradually agitated ; as a summer land- 
scape, at the break of day, is wrapt in mist : at first, 
the sun strikes on a single object, but the light and 
warmth increasing, the whole scene glows in the noon- 
day of imagination. How beautifully this state of the 



174 WORKS OF GENIUS 

mind, in the progress of composition, is described by 
Dryden, alluding to his work, " when it was only a 
confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another 
in the dark ; when the fancy was yet in its first work, 
moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, 
there to be distinguished, and then either to be chosen 
or rejected, by the judgment." At that moment, he 
adds, u I was in that eagerness of imagination, which, 
by over-pleasing fanciful men, flatters them into the 
danger of writing." Gibbon tells us of his history, 
" at the onset, all was dark and doubtful ; even the 
title of the work, the true era of the decline and fall of 
the empire, &c. I was often tempted to cast away the 
labour of seven years." Winckelman was long lost in 
composing his " History of Art ;" a hundred fruitless 
attempts were made, before he could discover a plan 
amidst the labyrinth. Slight conceptions kindle finished 
works. A lady asking for a few verses on rural topics, 
of the Abbe De Lille, his specimens pleased, and 
sketches heaped on sketches, produced " Les Jardins." 
In writing the " Pleasures of Memory," as it happened 
with " the Rape of the Lock," the poet at first proposed 
a simple description in a few lines, till conducted by 
meditation, the perfect composition of several years 
closed in that fine poem. That still valuable work, 
L 'Art de Tenser of the Port-Royal, was originally pro- 
jected to teach a young nobleman all that was practi- 
cally useful in the art of logic in a few days, and was 
intended to have been written in one morning by the 
great Arnauld ; but to that profound thinker, so many 
new ideas crowded in that slight task, that he was com- 
pelled to call in his friend Nicolle ; and thus a few 



FROM SLIGHT CONCEPTIONS. 175 

projected pages closed in a Tolume so excellent, that 
our elegant metaphysician has recently declared, that 
" it is hardly possible to estimate the merits too highly." 
Pemberton, who knew Newton intimately, informs us 
that his treatise on Natural Philosophy, full of a variety 
of profound inventions, was composed by him from 
scarcely any other materials than the few propositions 
he had set down several years before, and which having 
resumed, occupied him in writing one year and a half. 
A curious circumstance has been preserved in the life 
of the other immortal man in philosophy, Lord Bacon. 
When young, he wrote a letter to Father Fulgentio 
concerning an Essay of his to which he gave the title 
of " The greatest Birth of Time," a title which he cen- 
sures as too pompous. The Essay itself is lost, but it 
w T as the first outline of that great design which he after- 
wards pursued and finished in his " Instauration of the 
Sciences." Locke himself has informed us, that his 
great work on " the Human Understanding," when he 
first put pen to paper, he thought " would have been 
contained in one sheet, but that the farther he went on 
the larger prospect he had." In this manner it would 
be beautiful to trace the history of the human mind, 
and observe how a Newton and a Bacon and a Locke 
were proceeding for thirty years together, in accumu- 
lating truth upon truth, and finally building up these 
fabrics of their invention. 

Were it possible to collect some thoughts of great 
thinkers, which were never written, we should discover 
vivid conceptions, and an originality they never dared to 
pursue in their works! Artists have this advantage 
over authors, that their virgin fancies, their chance feli- 



MEDITATION EXERCISED AT ALL TIMES. 

cities, which labour cannot afterwards produce, are con- 
stantly perpetuated ; and these u studies," as they are 
called, are as precious to posterity, as their more com- 
plete designs. In literature we possess one remarkable 
evidence of these fortuitous thoughts of genius. Pope 
and Swift, being in the country together, observed, 
that if contemplative men were to notice " the thoughts 
which suddenly present themselves to their minds when 
walking in the fields, &c. they might find many as well 
worth preserving as some of their more deliberate re- 
flections." They made a trial, and agreed to write down 
such involuntary thoughts as occurred during their stay 
there. These furnished out the " Thoughts" in Pope's 
and Swift's Miscellanies*. Among Lord Bacon's Re- 
mains, we find a paper entitled " sudden thoughts, set 
down for profit." At all hours, by the side of Vol- 
taire's bed, or on his table, stood his pen and ink with 
slips of paper. The margins of his books were covered 
with his " sudden thoughts." Cicero, in reading, con- 
stantly took notes and made comments. There is an 
art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art 
of writing. 

The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, 
and in all places ; and men of genius, in their walks, at 
table, and amidst assemblies, turning the eye of the mind 
inwards, can form an artificial solitude ; retired amidst 
a crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly. 
When Domenichino was reproached for his dilatory 
habits in not finishing a great picture for which he had 



* This anecdote is found in Ruft'head's Life of Pope, evidently given 
by Warbur on, as was everything of personal knowledge in that taste- 
less volume of a mere lawyer, who presumed to write the life of a poet. 



MEDITATION EXERCISED AT ALL TIMES. 177 

contracted, his reply described this method of study. 
Eh ! Io la sto continuamente dipingendo entro di me — 
I am continually painting it within myself. Hogarth, 
with an eye always awake to the ridiculous, would 
catch a character on his thumb-nail. Leonardo da 
Yinci has left a great number of little books which he 
usually carried in his girdle, that he might instantly 
sketch whatever he wished to recall to his recollections ; 
and Amoretti discovered that in these light sketches, 
this fine genius was forming a system of physiognomy 
which he frequently inculcated to his pupils. Haydn 
carefully noted down in a pocket-book the passages and 
ideas which came to him in his walks or amid company. 
Some of the great actions of men of this habit of mind 
were first meditated on, amidst the noise of a convivial 
party, or the music of a concert. The victory of 
"Waterloo might have been organised in the ball-room 
at Brussels ; and thus Rodney, at the table of Lord 
Sandwich, while the bottle was briskly circulating, 
being observed arranging bits of cork, and his solitary 
amusement having excited inquiry, said that he was 
practising a plan to annihilate an enemy's fleet. This 
proved to be that discovery of breaking the line, which 
the happy audacity of the hero afterwards executed. 
What situation is more common than a sea-voyage, 
where nothing presents itself to the reflections of most 
men than irksome observatioDS on the desert of waters ? 
But the constant exercise of the mind by habitual prac- 
tice is the privilege of a commanding genius ; and, in a 
similar situation, we discover Cicero and Sir William 
Jones acting alike. Amidst the Oriental seas, in a 
voyage of 12,000 miles, the mind of Jones kindled with 

N 



178 CONTINUITY OF ATTENTION. 

delightful enthusiasm, and he has perpetuated those 
elevating feelings in his discourse to the Asiatic Society ; 
so Cicero on board a ship, sailing slowly along the 
coast, passing by a town where his friend Trebatius 
resided, wrote a work which the other had expressed a 
wish to possess, and of which wish the view of the town 
had reminded him. 

To this habit of continuity of attention, tracing the 
first simple idea to its remoter consequences, the philo- 
sophical genius owes many of its discoveries. It was 
one evening in the cathedral of Pisa, that Galileo 
observed the vibrations of a brass lustre pendant from 
the vaulted roof, which had been left swinging by one 
of the vergers. The habitual meditation of genius com- 
bined with an ordinary accident a new idea of science, 
and hence, conceived the invention of measuring time by 
the medium of a pendulum. Who but a genius of this 
order, sitting in his orchard, and observing the descent 
of an apple, could have discovered a new quality in 
matter, and have ascertained the laws of attraction, by 
perceiving that the same causes might perpetuate the re- 
gular motions of the planetary system; who, but a genius 
of this order, while viewing boys blowing soap-bladders, 
could have discovered the properties of light and colours, 
and then anatomised a ray ? Franklin, on board a 
ship, observing a partial stillness in the waves when they 
threw down water which had been used for culinary 
purposes, by the same principle of meditation was led to 
the discovery of the wonderful property in oil of calming 
the agitated ocean ; and many a ship has been preserved 
in tempestuous weather, or a landing facilitated on a 
dangerous surf, by this solitary meditation of genius. 



MEDITATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 179 

Thus meditation draws out of the most simple truths 
the strictness of philosophical demonstration ; convert- 
ing even the amusements of school-boys, or the most 
ordinary domestic occurrences, into the principle of a 
new science. The phenomenon of galvanism was fami- 
liar to students ; yet was there but one man of genius 
who could take advantage of an accident, give it his 
name, and fix it as a science. It was while lying in his 
bath, but still meditating on the means to detect the 
fraud of the goldsmith who had made Hiero's crown, 
that the most extraordinary philosopher of antiquity was 
led to the investigation of a series of propositions demon- 
strated in the two books of Archimedes, De insidenti- 
bus in jluido, still extant ; and which a great mathe- 
matician admires both for the strictness and the elegance 
of the demonstrations. To as minute a domestic occur- 
rence as Galvani's, we owe the steam-engine. When 
the Marquis of Worcester was a state prisoner in the 
Tower, he one day observed, while his meal was pre- 
paring in his apartment, that the cover of the vessel 
being tight, was, by the expansion of the steam, sud- 
denly forced off, and driven up the chimney. His 
inventive mind was led on in a train of thought with 
reference to the practical application of steam as a first 
mover. His observations, obscurely exhibited in his 
" Century of Inventions," were successively wrought out 
by the meditations of others, and an incident, to which 
one can hardly make a formal reference without a 
risible emotion, terminated in the noblest instance of 
mechanical power. 

Into the stillness of meditation the mind of genius 
must be frequently thrown ; it is a kind of darkness 
n2 



180 MEDITATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 

which hides from us all surrounding objects, even in 
the light of day. This is the first state of existence in 
genius. In Cicero's Treatise on Old Age, we find Cato 
admiring Caius Sulpitius Gallus, who when he sat 
down to write in the morning, was surprised by the 
evening ; and when he took up his pen in the evening, 
was surprised by the appearance of the morning. So- 
crates sometimes remained a whole day in immovable 
meditation, his eyes and countenance directed to one 
spot, as if in the stillness of death. La Fontaine, 
when writing his comic tales, has been observed early 
in the morning and late in the evening in the same re- 
cumbent posture under the same tree. This quiescent 
state is a sort of enthusiasm, and renders everything 
that surrounds us as distant as if an immense interval 
separated us from the scene. Poggius has told us of 
Dante, that he indulged his meditations more strongly 
than any man he knew; for when deeply busied in 
reading, he seemed to live only in his ideas. Once the 
poet went to view a public procession ; having entered 
a booksellers shop, and taken up a book, he sunk into 
a reverie ; on his return he declared that he had neither 
seen nor heard a single occurrence in the public exhibi- 
tion, which had passed unobserved before him. It has 
been told of a modern astronomer, that one summer 
night, when he was withdrawing to his chamber, the 
brightness of the heavens showed a phenomenon : he 
passed the whole night in observing it ; and when they 
came to him early in the morning, and found him in 
the same attitude, he said, like one who had been recol- 
lecting his thoughts for a few moments, " It must be 
thus ; but I '11 go to bed before it is late." He had 



MEDITATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 181 

gazed the entire night in meditation, and was not aware 
of it. Abernethy has finely painted the situation of 
Newton in this state of mind. I will not change his 
words, for his words are his feelings. " It was this 
power of mind — which can contemplate the greatest 
number of facts or propositions with accuracy — that so 
eminently distinguished Newton from other men. It 
was this power that enabled him to arrange the whole 
of a treatise in his thoughts before he committed a 
single idea to paper. In the exercise of this power, he 
was known occasionally to have passed a whole night 
or day, entirely inattentive to surrounding objects." 

There is nothing incredible in the stories related of 
some who have experienced this entranced state in 
study, where the mind, deliciously inebriated with the 
object it contemplates, feels nothing, from the excess of 
feeling, as a philosopher well describes it. The im- 
pressions from our exterior sensations are often suspend- 
ed by great mental excitement. Archimedes, involved 
in the investigation of mathematical truth, and the 
painters Protogenes and Parmeggiano found their 
senses locked up as it were in meditation, so as to be 
incapable of withdrawing themselves from their work, 
even in the midst of the terrors and storming of the 
place by the enemy. Marino was so absorbed in the 
composition of his u Adonis," that he suffered his leg 
to be burnt before the painful sensation grew stronger 
than the intellectual pleasure of his imagination. Mon- 
sieur Thomas, a modern French writer, and an intense 
thinker, would sit for hours against a hedge, composing 
with a low voice, taking the same pinch of snuff for 
half an hour together, without being aware that it had 



182 MEDITATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 

long disappeared. When he quitted his apartment, 
after prolonging his studies there, a visible alteration 
was observed in his person, and the agitation of his 
recent thoughts was still traced in his air and manner. 
With eloquent truth Buffon described those reveries of 
the student, which compress his day, and mark the 
hours by the sensations of minutes ! " Invention de- 
pends on patience : contemplate your subject long ; it 
will gradually unfold till a sort of electric spark con- 
vulses for a moment the brain, and spreads down to 
the very heart a glow of irritation. Then come the 
luxuries of genius, the true hours for production and 
composition; hours so delightful, that I have spent 
twelve or fourteen successively at my writing-desk, and 
still been in a state of pleasure." Bishop Horne, 
whose literary feelings were of the most delicate and 
lively kind, has beautifully recorded them in his pro- 
gress through a favourite and lengthened work — his 
Commentary on the Psalms. He alludes to himself in 
the third person; yet who but the self-painter could 
have caught those delicious emotions which are so 
evanescent in the deep occupation of pleasant studies ? 
" He arose fresh in the morning to his task ; the silence 
of the night invited him to pursue it ; and he can truly 
say, that food and rest were not preferred before it. 
Every part improved infinitely upon his acquaintance 
with it, and no one gave him uneasiness but the last, 
for then he grieved that his work was done." 

This eager delight of pursuing study, this impatience 
of interruption, and this exultation in progress, are 
alike finely described by Milton in a letter to his 
friend Diodati. 



MEDITATIONS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 183 

" Such is the character of my inind, that no delay, 
none of the ordinary cessations for rest or otherwise, I 
had nearly said, care or thinking of the very subject, 
can hold me back from being hurried on to the destined 
point, and from completing the great circuit, as it were, 
of the study in which I am engaged." 

Such is the picture of genius viewed in the stillness 
of meditation ; but there is yet a more excited state, 
when, as if consciousness were mixing with its reveries, 
in the illusion of a scene, of a person, of a passion, the 
emotions of the soul affect even the organs of sense. 
This excitement is experienced when the poet in the 
excellence of invention, and the philosopher in the force 
of intellect, alike share in the hours of inspiration and 
the enthusiasm of genius. 



184 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 



CHAPTER XII. 

The enthusiasm of genius. — A state of mind resembling a waking 
dream distinct from reverie. — The ideal presence distinguished from 
the real presence. — The senses are really affected in the ideal world, 
proved by a variety of instances. — Of the rapture or sensation of 
deep study in art, in science, and literature. — Of perturbed feelings, 
in delirium — In extreme endurance of attention — And in visionary 
illusions. — Enthusiasts in literature and art — of their self-immola- 
tions. 

"We left the man of genius in the stillness of medita- 
tion. We have now to pursue his history through that 
more excited state which occurs in the most active 
operations of genius, and which the term reverie in- 
adequately indicates. Metaphysical distinctions but ill 
describe it, and popular language affords no terms for 
those faculties and feelings which escape the observation 
of the multitude not affected by the phenomenon. 

The illusion produced by a drama on persons of great 
sensibility, when all the senses are awakened by a mix- 
ture of reality with imagination, is the effect experi- 
enced by men of genius in their own vivified ideal 
world. Real emotions are raised by fiction. In a scene, 
apparently passing in their presence, where the whole 
train of circumstances succeeds in all the continuity of 
nature, and where a sort of real existences appear to 
rise up before them, they themselves become spectators 
or actors. Their sympathies are excited, and the ex- 
terior organs of sense are visibly affected — they even 






THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 185 

break out into speech, and often accompany their speech 
with gestures. 

In this equivocal state the enthusiast of genius pro- 
duces his master-pieces. This waking dream is distinct 
from reverie, where, our thoughts wandering without 
connexion, the faint impressions are so evanescent as to 
occur without even being recollected. A day of reverie 
is beautifully painted by Rousseau as distinct from a 
day of thinking : " J'ai des journees delicieuses, errant 
sans souci, sans projet, sans affaire, de bois en bois, et 
de rocher en rocher, revant toujour s et ne pensant point." 
Far different, however, is one closely pursued act of 
meditation, carrying the enthusiast of genius beyond the 
precinct of actual existence. The act of contemplation 
then creates the thing contemplated. He is now the 
busy actor in a world which he himself only views ; 
alone, he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs, he 
weeps ; his brows and lips, and his very limbs move. 

Poets and even painters, who, as Lord Bacon de- 
scribes witches, " are imaginative," have often involun- 
tarily betrayed, in the act of composition, those gestures 
which accompany this enthusiasm. Witness Domeni- 
chino enraging himself that he might portray anger. 
Nor were these creative gestures quite unknown to 
Quintilian, who has nobly compared them to the 
lashings of the lion's tail, rousing him to combat. 
Actors of genius have accustomed themselves to walk 
on the stage for an hour before the curtain was drawn, 
that they might fill their minds with all the phantoms 
of the drama, and so suspend all communion with the 
external world. The great actress of our age, during 
representation, always had the door of her dressing- 



186 THE IDEAL PRESENCE DISTINGUISHED 

room open, that she might listen to, and if possible 
watch the whole performance, with the same attention 
as was experienced by the spectators. By this means 
she possessed herself of all the illusion of the scene; 
and when she herself entered on the stage, her dreaming 
thoughts then brightened into a vision, where the per- 
ceptions of the soul were as firm and clear as if she 
were really the Constance or the Katherine whom she 
only represented*. 

Aware of this peculiar faculty, so prevalent in the 
more vivid exercise of genius, Lord Kaimes seems to 
have been the first who, in a work on criticism, at- 
tempted to name the ideal presence, to distinguish it 
from the real presence of things. It has been called 
the representative faculty, the imaginative state, and 
many other states and faculties. Call it what we will, 
no term opens to us the invisible mode of its operations, 
no metaphysical definition expresses its variable nature. 
Conscious of the existence of such a faculty, our critic 
perceived that the conception of it is by no means clear 
when described in words. 

Has not the difference between an actual thing, and 
its image in a glass, perplexed some philosophers ? and 
it is well known how far the ideal philosophy has been 
carried by so fine a genius as Bishop Berkley. " All 
are pictures, alike painted on the retina, or optical sen- 
sorium ! " exclaimed the enthusiast Barry, who only 
saw pictures in nature, and nature in pictures. This 
faculty has had a strange influence over the passionate 

* The Lite Mrs. Siddons. She herself communicated this striking 
circumstance to me. 



FROM THE REAL PRESENCE. 187 

lovers of statues. We find unquestionable evidence of 
the vividness of the representative faculty, or the ideal 
presence, vying with that of reality. Evelyn has de- 
scribed one of this cast of mind, in the librarian of the 
Vatican, who haunted one of the finest collections at 
Rome. To these statues he would frequently talk as if 
they were living persons, often kissing and embracing 
them. A similar circumstance might be recorded of a 
man of distinguished talent and literature among our- 
selves. Wondrous stories are told of the amatorial 
passion for marble statues ; but the wonder ceases, and 
the truth is established, when the irresistible ideal pre- 
sence is comprehended; the visions which now bless 
these lovers of statues, in the modern land of sculpture, 
Italy, had acted with equal force in ancient Greece. 
" The Last Judgment," the stupendous ideal presence of 
Michael Angelo, seems to have communicated itself 
to some of his beholders : " As I stood before this pic- 
ture," a late traveller tells us, " my blood chilled as if 
the reality were before me, and the very sound of the 
trumpet seemed to pierce my ears." 

Cold and barren tempers without imagination, whose 
impressions of objects never rise beyond those of me- 
mory and reflection, which know only to compare, and 
not to excite, will smile at this equivocal state of the 
ideal presence ; yet it is a real one to the enthusiast of 
genius, and it is his happiest and peculiar condition. 
Destitute of this faculty, no metaphysical aid, no art 
to be taught him, no mastery of talent, will avail him ; 
unblest with it, the votary will find each sacrifice lying 
cold on the altar, for no accepting flame from heaven 
shall kindle it. 



188 THE SENSES ARE REALLY AFFECTED 

This enthusiasm indeed can only be discovered by 
men of genius themselves ; yet when most under its 
influence, they can least perceive it, as the eye which 
sees all things cannot view itself; or rather such an 
attempt would be like searching for the principle of life, 
which were it found, would cease to be life. From an 
enchanted man we must not expect a narrative of his 
enchantment ; for if he could speak to us reasonably, 
and like one of ourselves, in that case he would be a 
man in a state of disenchantment, and then would per- 
haps yield us no better account than we may trace by 
our own observations. 

There is however something of reality in this state of 
the ideal presence ; for the most familiar instances will 
show how the nerves of each external sense are put in 
motion by the idea of the object, as if the real object 
had been presented to it. The difference is only in 
the degree. The senses are more concerned in the ideal 
world than at first appears. The idea of a thing will 
make us shudder ; and the bare imagination of it will 
often produce a real pain. A curious consequence may 
be deduced from this principle : Milton, lingering amid 
the freshness of nature in Eden, felt all the delights of 
those elements which he was creating ; his nerves moved 
with the images which excited them. The fierce and 
wild Dante, amidst the abysses of his Inferno, must 
often have been startled by its horrors, and often left his 
bitter and gloomy spirit in the stings he inflicted on 
the great criminal. The movable nerves then of the 
man of genius are a reality ; he sees, he hears, he feels 
by each. How mysterious to us is the operation of this 
faculty ! 



IN THE IDEAL WORLD. 189 

A Homer and a Richardson*, like nature, open a 
volume laro-e as life itself — embracing a circuit of human 
existence ! This state of the mind has even a reality 
in it for the generality of persons. In a romance or a 
drama tears are often seen in the eyes of the reader 
or the spectator, who, before they have time to recol- 
lect that the whole is fictitious, have been surprised for 
a moment by a strong conception of a present and exist- 
ing scene. 

Can we doubt of the reality of this faculty, when the 
visible and outward frame of the man of genius bears 
witness to its presence ? When Fielding said, " I do 
not doubt but the most pathetic and affecting scenes have 
been writ with tears," he probably drew that discovery 
from an inverse feeling to his own. Fielding would 
have been gratified to have confirmed the observation by 
facts which never reached him. Metastasio, in writing 
the ninth scene of the second act of his " Olympiad," 
found himself suddenly moved — shedding tears. The 
imagined sorrows had inspired real tears ; and they 
afterwards proved contagious. Had our poet not per- 
petuated his surprise by an interesting sonnet, the 
circumstance had pased away with the emotion, as 
many such have. Pope could never read Priam's speech 
for the loss of his son, without tears, and frequently has 
been observed to weep over tender and melancholy 
passages. Alfieri, the most energetic poet of modern 
times, having composed, without a pause, the whole 

* Richardson assembles a family about him, writing down what they 
said, seeing their very manner of saying, living with them as often and 
as long as he wills — with such a personal unity, that an ingenious lawyer 
once told me that he required no stronger evidence of a fact in any 
court of law than a circumstantial scene in Richardson. 



190 THE RAPTURE OF DEEP STUDY 

of an act, noted in the margin — " Written under a 
paroxysm of enthusiasm, and while shedding a flood of 
tears." The impressions which the frame experiences 
in this state, leave deeper traces behind them than those 
of reverie. A circumstance accidentally preserved, has 
informed us of the tremors of Dryden, after having 
written that ode*, which, as he confessed, he had pursued 
without the power of quitting it ; but these tremors 
were not unusual with him — for in the preface to his 
Tales, he tells us, that " in translating Homer he found 
greater pleasure than in Virgil ; but it was not a 
pleasure without pain ; the continual agitation of the 
spirits must needs be a weakener to any constitution, 
especially in age, and many pauses are required for 
refreshment betwixt the heats." 

We find Metastasio, like others of the brotherhood, 
susceptible of this state, complaining of his sufferings 
during the poetical sestus. " When I apply with atten- 
tion, the nerves of my sensorium are put into a violent 
tumult ; I grow as red as a drunkard, and am obliged 
to quit my work." When Buffon was absorbed on a 
subject which presented great objections to his opinions, 
he felt his head burn, and saw his countenance flushed ; 
and this was a warning for him to suspend his attention. 
Gray could never compose voluntarily; his genius 
resembled the armed apparition in Sh?kspeare's master- 
tragedy. " He would not be commanded." When he 
wished to compose the Installation Ode, for a consider- 

* This famous and unparalleled ode was probably afterwards re- 
touched ; but Joseph Warton discovered in it the rapidity of the 
thoughts, and the glow and the expressiveness of the images ; which are 
the certain marks of the first sketch of a master. 



IN ART, SCIENCE, AND LITERATURE. 191 

able time he felt himself without the power to begin it : 
a friend calling on him, Gray flung open his door hastily, 
and in a hurried voice and tone, exclaiming in the first 
verse of that ode, 

" Hence, avaunt ! 'tis holy ground !" — 

His friend started at the disordered appearance of the 
bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his very air and 
countenance. 

Listen to one labouring with all the magic of the spell. 
Madame Roland has thus powerfully described the 
ideal presence in her first readings of Telemachus and 
Tasso : — ' ' My respiration rose, I felt a rapid fire colour- 
ing my face, and my voice changing had betrayed my 
agitation. I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and Erminia 
for Tancred. However, during this perfect transform- 
ation, I did not yet think that I myself was anything, 
for any one : the whole had no connexion with myself. 
I sought for nothing around me; I was they ; I saw 
only the objects which existed for them ; it was a dream, 
without being awakened." 

The description, which so calm and exquisite an 
investigator of taste and philosophy, as our sweet and 
polished Reynolds has given of himself at one of these 
moments, is too rare, not to be recorded in his own 
words. Alluding to the famous Transfiguration, our 
own Raffaelle says, " When I have stood looking at 
that picture from figure to figure, the eagerness, the 
spirit, the close unaffected attention of each figure to 
the principal action, my thoughts have carried me away, 
that I have forgot myself ; and for that time might be 
looked upon as an enthusiastic madman ; for I could 



192 THE RAPTURE OF DEEP STUDY 

really fancy the whole action was passing before my 
eyes." 

The effect which the study of Plutarch's Illustrious 
Men produced on the mighty mind of Alfieri, during 
a whole winter, while he lived as it were among the 
heroes of antiquity, he has himself described. Alfieri 
wept and raved with grief and indignation that he was 
born under a government, which favoured no Roman 
heroes and sages. As often as he was struck with the 
great deeds of these great men, in his extreme agitation 
he rose from his seat as one possessed. The feeling of 
genius in Alfieri was suppressed for more than twenty 
years, by the discouragement of his uncle : but as the 
natural temperament cannot be crushed out of the soul 
of genius, he was a poet without writing a single verse ; 
and as a great poet, the ideal presence at times became 
ungovernable, verging to madness. In traversing the 
wilds of Arragon his emotions would certainly have 
given birth to poetry, could he have expressed himself 
in verse. It was a complete state of the imaginative 
existence, or this ideal presence ; for he proceeded along 
the wilds of Arragon in a reverie, weeping and laughing 
by turns. He considered this as a folly, because it 
ended in nothing but in laughter and tears. He was 
not aware that he was then yielding to a demonstration, 
could he have judged of himself, that he possessed 
those dispositions of mind and that energy of passion 
which form the poetical character. 

Genius creates by a single conception ; the statuary 
conceives the statue at once, which he afterwards executes 
by the slow process of art ; and the architect contrives 
a whole palace in an instant. In a single principle, 



IN ART, SCIENCE AND LITERATURE. 193 

opening as it were on a sudden to genius, a great and 
new system of things is discovered. It lias happened, 
sometimes, that this single conception, rushing over the 
whole concentrated spirit, has agitated the frame con- 
vulsively. It comes like a whispered secret from Nature. 
When Malebranche first took up Descartes's Treatise on 
Man, the germ of his own subsequent philosophic system, 
such was his intense feeling, that a violent palpitation of 
the heart, more than once, obliged him to lay down the 
volume. When the first idea of the " Essay on the 
Arts and Sciences" rushed on the mind of .Rousseau, a 
feverish symptom in his nervous system approached to 
a slight delirium. Stopping under an oak, he wrote 
with a pencil the Prosopopeia of Fabricius. — "I still 
remember my solitary transport at the discovery of a 
philosophical argument against the doctrine of transub- 
stantiation," exclaimed Gibbon in his Memoirs. 

This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed the 
voices of poets in reciting their most pathetic passages. 
— Thomson was so oppressed by a passage in Yirgil or 
Milton when he attempted to read, that " his voice sunk 
in ill-articulated sounds from the bottom of his breast." 
The tremulous figures of the ancient Sibyl appear to 
have been viewed in the land of the Muses, by the 
energetic description which Paulus Jovius gives us, of 
the impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian improvi- 
satori, some of whom, I have heard from one present at 
a similar exhibition, have not degenerated in poetic 
inspiration, nor in its corporeal excitement. " His eyes 
fixed downwards, kindle, as he gives utterance to his 
effusions, the moist drops flow down his cheeks, the - 
veins of his forehead swell, and wonderfully his learned 



194 ENTHUSIASM EXCITED ON BEHOLDING 

ear, as it were, abstracted and intent, moderates each 
impulse of his flowing numbers.*" 

This enthusiasm throws the man of genius amid 
Nature, into absorbing reveries when the senses of other 
men are overcome at the appearance of destruction ; he 
continues to view only Nature herself. The mind of 
Pliny, to add one more chapter to his mighty scroll, 
sought Nature amidst the volcano in which he perished. 
Vernet was on board a ship in a raging tempest where 
all hope was given up. The astonished captain beheld 
the artist of genius, his pencil in his hand, in calm 
enthusiasm, sketching the terrible world of waters — 
studying the wave that was rising to devour him. 

There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated studies 
of antiquity. Then the ideal presence or the imagina- 
tive existence prevails, by its perpetual associations, or 
as the late Dr. Brown has perhaps more distinctly 
termed them, suggestions. " In contemplating antiquity, 
the mind itself becomes antique ; " was finely observed 
by Livy, long ere our philosophy of the mind existed as 
a system. This rapture, or sensation of deep study, 
has been described by one whose imagination had 
strayed into the occult learning of antiquity, and in the 
hymns of Orpheus, it seemed to him that he had lifted 
the veil from Nature. His feelings were associated 
with her loneliness. I translate his words. " When I 
took these dark mystical hymns into my hands, I 
appeared as it were to be descending into an abyss of 
the mysteries of venerable antiquity ; at that moment, 

* The passage is curious. — " Canenti defixi exardent oculi, sudores 
manant, frontis venae contumescunt, et quod mirum est, eruditae aures, 
tanquam alienee et intentae, omneni impetum profluentium numerorum 
exactissima ratione moderantur." 






THE MONUMENTS OF DEPARTED NATIONS. 195 



the world in silence and the stars and moon only, 
watching me." This enthusiasm is confirmed by 
Mr. Mathias who applies this description to his own 
emotions on his first opening the manuscript volumes of 
the poet Gray on the philosophy of Plato ; " and many 
a learned man," he adds, " will acknowledge as his own, 
the feelings of this animated scholar." 

o 

Amidst the monuments of great and departed nations, 
our imagination is touched by the grandeur of local 
impressions, and the vivid associations, or suggestions, 
of the manners, the arts, and the individuals, of a great 
people. The classical author of Anacharsis, when 
in Italy, would often stop as if overcome by his 
recollections. Amid camps, temples, circuses, hippo- 
dromes, and public and private edifices, he as it 
were held an interior converse with the manes of 
those who seemed hovering about the capital of the 
old world ; as if he had been a citizen of ancient Rome, 
travelling in the modern. So men of genius have roved 
amid the awful ruins till the ideal presence has fondly 
built up the city anew, and have become Romans in the 
Rome of two thousand years past. Pomponius LiETUs, 
who devoted his life to this study, was constantly seen 
wandering amidst the vestiges of this " throne of the 
world." There, in many a reverie, as his eye rested on 
the mutilated arch and the broken column, abstracted 
and immoveable, he dropped tears in the ideal presence 
of Rome and of the Romans. Another enthusiast of 
this class was Bosius, who sought beneath Rome for 
another Rome, in those catacombs built by the early 
Christians, for their asylum and their sepulchre. His 
work of u Roma Sotteranea" is the production of a sub- 
o2 



196 ENTHUSIASM IN GREAT 

terraneous life, passed in fervent and perilous labours. 
Taking with him a hermit's meal for the week, this new 
Pliny often descended into the bowels of the earth, by 
lamp-light, clearing away the sand and ruins till a 
tomb broke forth, or an inscription became legible. 
Accompanied by some friend whom his enthusiasm had 
inspired with his own sympathy, here he dictated his 
notes, tracing the mouldering sculpture, and catching 
the fading picture. Thrown back into the primitive 
ages of Christianity, amid the local impressions, the 
historian of the Christian catacombs collected the me- 
morials of an age and of a race, which were hidden 
beneath the earth. 

The same enthusiasm surrounds the world of science 
with that creating imagination which has startled even 
men of science by its peculiar discoveries. Werner, 
the mineralogist, celebrated for his lectures, appears, by 
some accounts transmitted by his auditors, to have exer- 
cised this faculty. Werner often said that " he always 
depended on the muse for inspiration." His unwritten 
lecture was a reverie — till kindling in his progress, 
blending science and imagination in the grandeur of his 
conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about him 
the very elements of nature, his spirit seemed to be 
hovering over the waters and the strata. With the 
same enthusiasm of science, Cuvier meditated on some 
bones, and. some fragments of bones, which could not 
belong to any known class of the animal kingdom. The 
philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins till he con- 
structed numerous species which had disappeared from 
the globe. This sublime naturalist has ascertained and 
classified the fossil remains of animals whose existence 



OPERATIONS OF GENIUS. 197 

can no longer be traced in the records of mankind. His 
own language bears testimony to the imagination which 
carried him on through a career so strange and wonder- 
ful. " It is a rational object of ambition in the mind 
of man, to whom only a short space of time is allotted 
upon earth, to have the glory of restoring the history of 
thousands of ages which preceded the existence of his race, 
and of thousands of animals that never were contempo- 
raneous icith his species." Philosophy becomes poetry, 
and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius. 
Even in the practical part of a science, painful to the 
operator himself, Mr. Abernethy has declared, and 
eloquently declared, that this enthusiasm is absolutely 
requisite. " We have need of enthusiasm, or some 
strong incentive, to induce us to spend our nights in 
study, and our days in the disgusting and health- 
destroying observation of human diseases, which alone 
can enable us to understand, alleviate, or remove them. 
On no other terms can we be considered as real students 
of our profession — to confer that which sick kings would 
fondly purchase with their diadem — that which wealth 
cannot purchase, nor state nor rank bestow — to alleviate. 
the most insupportable of human afflictions." Such is 
the enthusiasm of the physiologist of genius, who ele- 
vates the demonstrations of anatomical inquiries by the 
cultivation of the intellectual faculties, connecting " man 
with the common Master of the universe." 

This enthusiasm inconceivably fills the mind of genius 
in all great and solemn operations. It is an agitation 
amidst calmness, and is required not only in the fine 
arts, but wherever a great and continued exertion of the 
soul must be employed. The great ancients, who, if 



198 ENTHUSIASM IN GREAT 

they were not always philosophers, were always men of 
genius, saw, or imagined they saw a divinity within 
the man. This enthusiasm is alike experienced in the 
silence of study and amidst the roar of cannon, in paint- 
ing a picture, or in scaling a rampart. View De Thou, 
the historian, after his morning prayers, imploring the 
Divinity to purify his heart from partiality and hatred, 
and to open his spirit in developing the truth, amidst 
the contending factions of his times; and Haydn, 
employed in his " Creation," earnestly addressing the 
Creator ere he struck his instrument. In moments like 
these, man becomes a perfect unity — one thought and 
one act, abstracted from all other thoughts and all other 
acts. This intensity of the mind was felt by Gray in 
his loftiest excursions, and is perhaps the same power 
which impels the villager, when, to overcome his rivals 
in a contest for leaping, he retires back some steps, col- 
lects all exertion into his mind, and clears the eventful 
bound. One of our admirals in the reign of Elizabeth, 
held as a maxim, that a height of passion, amounting to 
frenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for the com- 
mand of a fleet ; and Nelson, decorated by all his 
honours about him, on the day of battle, at the sight of 
those emblems of glory emulated himself. This enthu- 
siasm was necessary for his genius, and made it effective. 
But this enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has been 
by the operation of the imaginative existence, becomes 
a state of perturbed feeling, and can only be distin- 
guished from a disordered intellect by the power of 
volition possessed by a sound mind of withdrawing from 
the ideal world into the world of sense. It is but a step 
which may carry us from the wanderings of fancy into 



OPERATIONS OF GENIUS. 199 

the aberrations of delirium. The endurance of attention, 
even in minds of the highest order, is limited by a law 
of nature ; and when thinking is goaded on to ex- 
haustion, confusion of ideas ensues, as straining any one 
of our limbs by excessive exertion produces tremor and 
torpor. 

" With curious art the brain too finely wrought 
Preys on herself, and is destroy' d by Thought ; 
Constant attention wears the active mind, 
Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind — 
The greatest genius to this fate may bow.'' 

Even minds less susceptible than high genius, may 
become overpowered by their imagination. Often, in 
the deep silence around us, we seek to relieve ourselves 
by some voluntary noise or action which may direct 
our attention to an exterior object, and bring us back to 
the world, which we had, as it were, left behind us. 
The circumstance is sufficiently familiar ; as well as 
another ; that whenever we are absorbed in profound 
contemplation, a startling noise scatters the spirits, and 
painfully agitates the whole frame. The nerves are then 
in a state of the utmost relaxation. There may be an 
agony in thought which only deep thinkers experience. 
The terrible effect of metaphysical studies on Beattie, 
has been told by himself. " Since the Essay on Truth 
was printed in quarto, I have never dared to read it 
over. I durst not even read the sheets to see whether 
there were any errors in the print, and was obliged to 
get a friend to do that office for me. These studies 
came in time to have dreadful effects upon my nervous 
system ; and I cannot read what I then wrote without 
some degree of horror, because it recalls to my mind the 



200 ILLUSIONS OF THE MIND OP GENIUS. 

horrors that I have sometimes felt after passing a long 
evening in those severe studies." 

Goldoni, after a rash exertion of writing sixteen 
plays in a year, confesses he paid the penalty of the 
folly. He flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious 
vacuity. To pass the day without doing anything, was 
all the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. But 
long after he said, " I felt at that time, and have ever 
since continued to feel, the consequence of that ex- 
haustion of spirits I sustained in composing my sixteen 
comedies." 

The enthusiasm of study was experienced by Pope 
in his self-education, and once it clouded over his fine 
intellect. It was the severity of his application which 
distorted his body ; and he then partook of a calamity 
incidental to the family of genius, for he sunk into that 
state of exhaustion which Smollett experienced during 
half a year, called a coma vigil, an affection of the brain, 
where the principle of life is so reduced, that all external 
objects appear to be passing in a dream. Boerhaave 
has related of himself, that having imprudently indulged 
in intense thought on a particular subject, he did not 
close his eyes for six weeks after ; and Tissot, in his 
work on the health of men of letters, abounds in similar 
cases, where a complete stupor has affected the unhappy 
student for a period of six months. 

Assuredly the finest geniuses have not always the 
power to withdraw themselves from that intensely inte- 
resting train of ideas, which we have shown has not been 
removed from about them by even the violent stimuli of 
exterior objects ; and the scenical illusion which then 
occurs, has been called the hallucinatio studiosa, or false 



ILLUSIONS OF THE MIND OF GENIUS. 201 

ideas in reverie. Such was the state in which Petrarch 
found himself in that minute narrative of a vision in 
which Laura appeared to him ; and Tasso in the lofty 
conversations he held with a spirit that glided towards 
him on the beams of the sun. In this state was Male- 
branche listening to the voice of God within him ; and 
Lord Herbert, when, to know whether he should 
publish his book, he threw himself on his knees, and 
interrogated the Deity in the stillness of the sky. And 
thus Pascal started at times at a fiery gulf opening 
by his side. Spinello having painted the fall of the 
rebellious angels, had so strongly imagined the illusion, 
and more particularly the terrible features of Lucifer, 
that he was himself struck with such horror as to have 
been long afflicted with the presence of the demon to 
which his genius had given birth. The influence of the 
same ideal presence operated on the religious painter 
Angeloni, who could never represent the sufferings of 
Jesus without his eyes overflowing with tears. Des- 
cartes, when young, and in a country seclusion, his 
brain exhausted with meditation, and his imagination 
heated to excess, heard a voice in the air which called 
him to pursue the search of truth ; nor did he doubt the 
vision, and this delirious dreaming of genius charmed 
him even in his after-studies. Our Collins and Cowper 
were often thrown into that extraordinary state of mind, 
when the ideal presence converts us into visionaries ; 
and their illusions w T ere as strong as Swedenborg's, 
who saw a terrestrial heaven in the glittering streets of 
his New Jerusalem ; or Jacob Behmen's, who listened 
to a celestial voice till he beheld the apparition of an 
angel ; or Cardan's, when he so carefully observed a 



202 ENTHUSIASM. 

number of little armed men at his feet ; or Benvenuto 
Cellini's, whose vivid imagination and glorious egotism 
so frequently contemplated " a resplendent light hover- 
ing over his shadow." 

Such minds identified themselves with their visions ! 
If we pass them over by asserting that they were insane, 
we are only cutting the knot which we cannot untie. 
We have no right to deny what some maintain, that a 
sympathy of the corporeal with the incorporeal nature 
of man, his imaginative with his physical existence, is 
an excitement which appears to have been experienced 
by persons of a peculiar organization, and which meta- 
physicians in despair must resign to the speculations of 
enthusiasts themselves, though metaphysicians reason 
about phenomena far removed from the perceptions of the 
eye. The historian of the mind cannot omit this fact, 
unquestionable, however incomprehensible. According 
i o our own conceptions, this state must produce a strange 
mysterious personage : a concentration of a human being 
within himself, endowed with inward eyes, ears which 
listen to interior sounds, and invisible hands touching 
impalpable objects, for whatever they act or however 
they are acted on, as far as respects themselves all must 
have passed within their own minds. The Platonic 
Dr. More flattered himself, that he was an enthusiast 
without enthusiasm, which seems but a suspicious state 
of convalescence. " I must ingenuously confess," he 
says, " that I have a natural touch of enthusiasm in my 
complexion, but such as I thank God was ever govern- 
able enough, and have found at length perfectly subdu- 
able. In virtue of which victory I know better what 
is in enthusiasts than they themselves ; and therefore, 



WAKING DREAMS OF GENIUS. 203 

was able to write with life and judgment, and shall, I 
hope, contribute not a little to the peace and quiet of this 
kingdom thereby." Thus far one of its votaries ; and all 
that he vaunts to have acquired by this mysterious 
faculty of enthusiasm is the having rendered it "at 
length perfectly subduable." Yet those who have 
written on " Mystical devotion," have declared, that 
4 ' It is a sublime state of mind to which whole sects 
have aspired, and some individuals appear to have at- 
tained*." The histories of great visionaries, were they 
correctly detailed, would probably prove how their 
delusions consisted of the ocular spectra of their brain 
and the accelerated sensations of their nerves. Bayle 
has conjured up an amusing theory of apparitions, to 
show that Hobbes, who was subject to occasional ter- 
rors, might fear that a certain combination of atoms 
agitating his brain might so disorder his mind as to 
expose him to spectral visions ; and so being very timid, 
and distrusting his own imagination, he was averse at 
times to be left alone. Apparitions often happen in 
dreams, but they may happen to a man when awake, 
for reading and hearing of them would revive their 
images, and these images might play, even an incredu- 
lous philosopher, some unlucky trick. 

But men of genius whose enthusiasm has not been 
past recovery, have experienced this extraordinary state 
of the mind, in those exhaustions of study to which they 
unquestionably are subject. Tissot, on " The Health 
of Men of Letters," has produced a terrifying number 

* Charles Butler has drawn up a sensible essay on il Mystical 
Devotion." He was a Roman Catholic. Norris, and Dr. Henry 
More, and Bishop Berkley may be consulted by the curious. 



204 EXHAUSTIONS OF GENIUS. 

of cases. They see and hear what none but themselves 
do. Genius thrown into this peculiar state, has pro- 
duced some noble effusions. Kotzebue was once ab- 
sorbed in hypochondriacal melancholy, and appears to 
have meditated on self-destruction ; but it happened, 
that he preserved his habit of dramatic composition, and 
produced one of his most energetic dramas — that of 
" Misanthropy and Repentance." He tells us, that he 
had never experienced such a rapid flow of thoughts and 
images, and he believed, what a physiological history 
would perhaps show, that there are some maladies, those 
of the brain and the nerves, which actually stretch the 
powers of the mind beyond their usual reach. It is the 
more vivid world of ideal existence ! 

But what is more evident, men of the finest genius 
have experienced these hallucinations in society acting 
on their moral habits. They have insulated the mind. 
"With them ideas have become realities, and suspicions 
certainties ; while events have been noted down as seen 
and heard which in truth had never occurred. Rous- 
seau's phantoms scarcely ever quitted him for a day. 
Barry imagined that he was invisibly persecuted by 
the Royal Academy, who had even spirited up a gang 
of housebreakers. The vivid memoirs of Alfieri will 
authenticate what Donne, who himself had suffered 
from them, calls " these eclipses, sudden offuscations and 
darkening of the senses." Too often the man of genius, 
with a vast and solitary power, darkens the scene of 
life ; he builds a pyramid between himself and the sun. 
Mocking at the expedients by which society has con- 
trived to protect its feebleness, he would break down 
the institutions from which he has shrunk away in the 






ILLUSIONS OF GENIUS. 205 



loneliness of his feelings. Such is the insulating intellect 
to which some of the most elevated spirits have been 
reduced. To imbue ourselves with the genius of their 
works, even to think of them, is an awful thing ! In 
nature their existence is a solecism, as their genius is a 
paradox ; for their crimes seem to be without guilt, their 
curses have kindness in them, and if they afflict man- 
kind it is in sorrow. 

Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase-price 
. of high passion and invention ? Perhaps never has there 
been a man of genius of this rare cast, who has not be- 
trayed the ebullitions of imagination in some outward 
action, at that period when the illusions of life are more 
real to genius than its realities. There is a fata mor- 
gana, that throws into the air a pictured land, and the 
deceived eye trusts till the visionary shadows glide 
away. " I have dreamt of a golden land," exclaimed 
Fuseli, " and solicit in vain for the barge which is to 
carry me to its shore." A slight derangement of our 
accustomed habits, a little perturbation of the faculties, 
and a romantic tinge on the feelings, give no indifferent 
promise of genius ; of that generous temper which 
knowing nothing of the baseness of mankind, with in- 
definite views carries on some glorious design to charm 
the world or to make it happier. Often we hear, from 
the confessions of men of genius, of their having in youth 
indulged the most elevating and the most chimerical 
projects ; and if age ridicule thy imaginative existence, 
be assured that it is the decline of its genius. That 
virtuous and tender enthusiast, Fenelon, in his early 
youth, troubled his friends with a classical and religious 
reverie. He was on the point of quitting them to restore 



206 SELF-IMMOLATION OF GENIUS. 

the independence of Greece, with the piety of a mission- 
ary, and with the taste of a classical antiquary. The 
Peloponnesus opened to him the church of Corinth 
where St. Paul preached, the Piraeus where Socrates 
conversed ; while the latent poet was to pluck laurels 
from Delphi, and rove amidst the amenities of Tempe. 
Such was the influence of the ideal presence ! and barren 
will be his imagination, and luckless his fortune, who, 
claiming the honours of genius, has never been touched 
by such a temporary delirium. 

To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we attri- 
bute the self-immolation of men of genius. Mighty 
and laborious works have been pursued, as a forlorn 
hope, at the certain destruction of the fortune of the 
individual. Yast labours attest the enthusiasm which 
accompanied their progress. Such men have sealed 
their works with their blood : they have silently borne 
the pangs of disease ; they have barred themselves from 
the pursuits of fortune; they have torn themselves 
away from all they loved in life, patiently suffering 
these self-denials, to escape from interruptions and im- 
pediments to their studies. Martyrs of literature and 
art, they behold in their solitude the halo of immortality 
over their studious heads — that fame which is " a life 
beyond life." Van Helmont in his library and his 
laboratory, preferred their busy solitude to the honours 
and the invitations of Rodolphus II., there writing- 
down what he daily experienced during thirty years ; 
nor would the enthusiast yield up to the emperor one of 
those golden and visionary days ! Milton would not 
desist from proceeding with one of his works, although 
warned by the physician of the certain loss of his sight. 



SELF-IMMOLATION OF GENIUS. 207 

He declared he preferred his duty to his eyes, and 
doubtless his fame to his comfort. Anthony Wood, 
to preserve the lives of others, voluntarily resigned his 
own to cloistered studies ; nor did the literary passion 
desert him in his last moments, when with his dying 
hands the hermit of literature still grasped his beloved 
papers, and his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his 
Athenas Oxonienses. Moreri, the founder of our great 
biographical collections, conceived the design with such 
enthusiasm, and found such seduction in the labour, 
that he willingly withdrew from the popular celebrity 
he had acquired as a preacher, and the preferment 
which a minister of state, in whose house he resided, 
would have opened to his views. After the first edition 
of his Historical Dictionary, he had nothing so much at 
heart as its improvement. His unyielding application 
was converting labour into death; but collecting his 
last renovated vigour, with his dying hands he gave 
the volume to the world, though he did not live to 
witness even its publication. All objects in life appeared 
mean to him, compared with that exalted delight of 
addressing to the literary men of his age, the history of 
their brothers. Such are the men, as Bacon says of 
himself, who are " the servants of posterity," 

" Who scorn delights, and live laborious days !" 

The same enthusiasm inspires the pupils of art con- 
sumed by their own ardour. The young and classical 
sculptor who raised the statue of Charles II., placed in 
the centre of the Royal Exchange, was, in the midst of 
his work, advised by his medical friends to desist ; for 
the energy of his labour, with the strong excitement of 



208 SELF-IMMOLATION OF GENIUS. 

his feelings, already had made fatal inroads in his con- 
stitution : but he was willing, he said, to die at the 
foot of his statue. The statue was raised, and the young 
sculptor, with the shining eye and hectic flush of con- 
sumption, beheld it there — returned home — and died. 
Drouais, a pupil of David, the French painter, was a 
youth of fortune, but the solitary pleasure of his youth 
was his devotion to Raphael; he was at his studies 
from four in the morning till night. " Painting or 
nothing !" was the cry of this enthusiast of elegance ; 
" First fame, then amusement," was another. His sen- 
sibility was great as his enthusiasm ; and he cut in 
pieces the picture for which David declared he would 
inevitably obtain the prize. " I have had my reward 
in your approbation ; but next year I shall feel more 
certain of deserving it," was the reply of this young 
enthusiast. Afterwards he astonished Paris with his 
Marius ; but while engaged on a subject which he could 
never quit, the principle of life itself was drying up in 
his veins. Henry Headley and Kirke White were 
the early victims of the enthusiasm of study, and are 
mourned by the few who are organised like themselves. 

" 'Twas thine own genius gave the final hlow, 

And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low; 
So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, 
No more through rolling clouds to soar again, 
View'd his own feather on the fatal dart, 
And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart ; 
Keen were his pangs, hut keener far to feel 
He nursed the pinion which impcll'd the steel, 
While the same plumage that had warm'd his nest, 
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast." 

One of our former great students, when reduced in 
health by excessive study, was entreated to abandon it, 






GENIUS CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT ENTHUSIASM. 209 

and in the scholastic language of the day, not to perdere 
mbstantiam propter accidentia. With a smile, the 
martyr of study repeated a verse from Juvenal : 

Nee propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. 
No ! not for life lose that for -which I live ! 

Thus the shadow of death falls among those who are 
existino- with more than life about them. Yet " there is 

o 

no celebrity for the artist," said Gesner, " if the love of 
his own art do not become a vehement passion ; if the 
hours he employs to cultivate it be not for him the most 
delicious ones of his life ; if study become not his true 
existence and his first happiness ; if the society of his 
brothers in art be not that which most pleases him ; if 
even in the night-time the ideas of his art do not occupy 
his vigils or his dreams ; if in the morning he fly not to 
his work, impatient to recommence what he left un- 
finished. These are the marks of him who labours for 
true glory and posterity ; but if he seek only to please 
the taste of his age, his works will not kindle the de- 
sires, nor touch the hearts of those who love the arts 
and the artists." 

Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will produce 
nothing but uninteresting works of art ; not a work of 
art resembling the dove of Archytas, which beautiful 
piece of mechanism, while other artists beheld flying, 
no one could frame such another dove to meet it in the 
air. Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit 
which hovers over the production of genius, throwing 
the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into 
the very ideal presence whence these works have really 
originated. A great work always leaves us in a state 
of musing. 

p 



210 LITERARY JEALOUSY PROPORTIONED 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Of the Jealousy of Genius — Jealousy often proportioned to the degree 
of genius. — A perpetual fever among Authors and Artists. — Instances 
of its incredible excess, among brothers and benefactors. — Of a 
peculiar species, where the fever consumes the sufferer, without it3 
malignancy. 

Jealousy, long supposed to be the offspring of little 
minds, is not, however, confined to them. In the lite- 
rary republic, the passion fiercely rages among the 
senators, as well as among the people. In that curious 
self- description which Linn^us, comprised in a single 
page, written with the precision of a naturalist, that 
great man discovered that his constitution was liable to 
be afflicted with jealousy. Literary jealousy seems 
often proportioned to the degree of genius, and the sha- 
dowy and equivocal claims of literary honour is the real 
cause of this terrible fear ; for in cases where the object is 
more palpable and definite than intellectual excellence, 
jealousy does not appear so strongly to affect the claimant 
for admiration. The most beautiful woman, in the 
season of beauty, is more haughty than jealous ; she 
rarely encounters a rival ; and while her claims exist, 
who can contend with a fine feature or a dissolving- 
glance ? But a man of genius has no other existence 
than in the opinion of the world ; a divided empire 
would obscure him, and a contested one might prove 
his annihilation. 

The lives of authors and artists exhibit a most 
painful disease in that jealousy which is the perpetual 



TO THE DEGREE OF GENIUS. 211 

fever of their existence. Why does Plato never mention 
Xenophon, and why does Xenophon inveigh against 
Plato, studiously collecting every little rumour which 
may detract from his fame ? They wrote on the same 
subject ! The studied affectation of Aristotle, to differ 
from the doctrines of his master Plato while he was 
following them, led him into ambiguities and contra- 
dictions which have been remarked. The two fathers 
of our poetry, Chaucer and Gower, suffered their 
friendship to be interrupted towards the close of their 
lives. Chaucer bitterly reflects on his friend for the in- 
delicacy of some of his tales : "Of all such cursed stories 
I say fy ! " and Gower, evidently in return, erased those 
verses in praise of his friend which he had inserted in 
the first copy of his " Confessio Amantis." Why did 
Corneille, tottering to the grave, when Racine con- 
sulted him on his first tragedy, advise the author never 
to write another ? Why does Voltaire continually 
detract from the sublimity of Corneille, the sweetness of 
Racine, and the fire of Crebillon ? Why did Dryden 
never speak of Otway with kindness but when in his 
grave, then acknowledging that Otway excelled him in 
the pathetic ? Why did Leibnitz speak slightingly of 
Locke's Essay, and meditate on nothing less than the 
complete overthrow of Newton's system ? Why, when 
Boccaccio sent to Petrarch a copy of Dante, declaring 
that the work was like a first light which had illumi- 
nated his mind, did Petrarch coldly observe that he had 
not been anxious to inquire after it, for intending him- 
self to compose in the vernacular idiom, he had no wish 
to be considered as a plagiary ; and he only allows 
Dante's superiority from having written in the vulgar 
p2 



212 LITERARY JEALOUSY A PERPETUAL FEVER 

idiom, which he did not consider an enviable merit. 
Thus frigidly Petrarch could behold the solitary iEtna 
before him, in the " Inferno," while he shrunk into 
himself with the painful consciousness of the existence 
of another poet, obscuring his own majesty. It is 
curious to observe Lord Shaftesbury treating with the 
most acrimonious contempt the great writers of his 
own times, Cowley, Dryden, Addison, and Prior. We 
cannot imagine that his lordship was so entirely desti- 
tute of every feeling of wit and genius as would appear 
by this damnatory criticism on all the wit and genius 
of his age. It is not, indeed, difficult to comprehend 
a different motive for this extravagant censure in the 
jealousy, which even a great writer often experiences 
when he comes in contact with his living rivals, and 
hardily, if not impudently, practises those arts of critical 
detraction to raise a moment's delusion, which can 
gratify no one but himself. 

The moral sense has often been found too weak to 
temper the malignancy of literary jealousy, and has 
impelled some men of genius to an incredible excess. 
A memorable example offers in the history of the 
two brother, Dr. William and John Hunter, both 
great characters fitted to be rivals ; but Nature, it was 
imagined, in the tenderness of blood, had placed 
a bar to rivalry. John, without any determined 
pursuit in his youth, was received by his brother 
at the height of his celebrity ; the doctor initiated him 
into his school ; they performed their experiments 
together ; and William Hunter was the first to announce 
to the world the great genius of his brother. After 
this close connexion in all their studies and discoveries 



AMONG AUTHORS AND ARTISTS. 213 

Dr. William Hunter published his magnificent work — 
the proud favourite of his heart, the assertor of his 
fame. Was it credible that the genius of the celebrated 
anatomist, which had been nursed under the wing of his 
brother, should turn on that wing to clip it ? John 
Hunter put in his claim to the chief discovery ; it was 
answered by his brother. The Royal Society, to whom 
they appealed, concealed the documents of this unnatural 
feud. The blow was felt, and the jealousy of literary 
honour for ever separated the brothers — the brothers of 
genius. 

Such, too, was the jealousy which separated Agostino 
and Annibal Carracct, whom their cousin Ludovico for 
so many years had attempted to unite, and who, during 
the time their academy existed, worked together, com- 
bining their separate powers. The learning and the 
philosophy of Agostino assisted the invention of the 
master genius Annibal ; but Annibal was jealous of the 
more literary and poetical character of Agostino, and, by 
his sarcastic humour, frequently mortified his learned 
brother. Alike great artists, when once employed on 
the same work, Agostino was thought to have excelled 
his brother. Annibal, sullen and scornful, immediately 
broke with him ; and their patron, Cardinal Farnese, 
was compelled to separate the brothers. Their fate is 
striking ; Agostino, divided from his brother Annibal, 
sunk into dejection and melancholy, and perished by a 
premature death, while Annibal closed his days not 
long after in a state of distraction. The brothers of 
Nature and Art could not live together, and could not 
live separate. 

The history of artists abounds with instances of 



214 EXCESSIVE LITERARY JEALOUSY 

jealousy, perhaps more than that of any other class of 
men of genius. Hudson, the master of Reynolds, 
could not endure the sight of his rising pupil, and 
would not suffer him to conclude the term of his 
apprenticeship ; while even the mild and elegant Rey- 
nolds himself became so jealous of Wilson, that he 
took every opportunity of depreciating his singular 
excellence. Stung by the madness of jealousy, Barry 
one day addressing Sir Joshua on his lectures, burst 
out, " Such poor flimsy stuff as your Discourses ! " 
clenching his fist in the agony of the convulsion. After 
the death of the great artist, Barry bestowed on him 
the most ardent eulogium, and deeply grieved over the 
past. But the race of genius born too " near the 
sun," have found their increased sensibility flame 
into crimes of a deeper dye — crimes attesting the 
treachery, and the violence of the professors of an 
art, which, it appears, in softening the souls of others, 
does not necessarily mollify those of the artists them- 
selves. The dreadful story of Andrea del Cas- 
tagno seems not doubtful. Having been taught 
the discovery of painting in oil by Domenico Yene- 
tiano, yet, still envious of the merit of the gene- 
rous friend who had confided that great secret to him, 
Andrea with his own hand, secretly assassinated him, 
that he might remain without a rival. The horror of 
his crime only appeared in his confession on his death- 
bed. Domenichino seems to have been poisoned for 
the preference he obtained over the Neapolitan artists, 
which raised them to a man against him, and reduced 
him to the necessity of preparing his food with his own 
hand. On his last return to Naples, Passeri says, 



AMONG AUTHORS AND ARTISTS. 215 

P Non fu mai piu vednto da buon occkio da qaelli Na- 
poletani : e li Pittori lo detestavano perche egli era ritor- 
nato — mori con qualche sosjjetto di veleno, e questo non e 
incerisimile perche I'interesso e un perfido tiranno." So 
that the Neapolitans honoured Genius at Naples by 
poison, which they might hare forgotten had it flou- 
rished at Rome. The famous cartoon of the battle of 
Pisa, a work of Michael Angelo, which he produced 
in a glorious competition with the Homer of painting, 
Leonardo da Yinci, and in which he had struck out 
the idea of a new style, is only known by a print which 
has preserved the wonderful composition ; for the ori- 
ginal, it is said, was cut into pieces by the mad jealousy 
of Baccto Bandinelli, whose whole life was made 
miserable by his consciousness of a superior rival. 

In the jealousy of genius, however, there is a peculiar 
case where the fever silently consumes the sufferer, 
without possessing the malignant character of the dis- 
ease. Even the gentlest temper declines under its slow 
wastings, and this infection may happen among dear 
friends, whenever a man of Genius loses that self- 
opinion which animates his solitary labours and con- 
stitutes his happiness. Perhaps when at the height 
of his class, he suddenly views himself eclipsed by 
another genius — and that genius his friend ! This is 
the jealousy not of hatred, but of despair. Churchill 
observed the feeling, but probably included in it a 
greater degree of malignancy than I would now describe. 

" Envy which turns pale, 
And sickens even if a friend prevail." 

Swift, in that curious poem on his own death, said 
of Pope, that 



216 LITERARY JEALOUSY WITHOUT MALIGNANCY. 

" He can in one couplet fix, 

More sense than I can do in six." 

The Dean, perhaps, is not quite serious, but probably is 
in the next lines ; 

" It gives me such a jealous fit, 
I cry ' Pox take him and his wit.' " 

If the reader pursue this hint throughout the poem, these 
compliments to his friends, always at his own expense, 
exhibit a singular mixture of the sensibility and the 
frankness of true genius, which Swift himself has 
honestly confessed. 

" What poet would not grieve to see 
His brother write a3 well as he ? ' " 

Addison experienced this painful and mixed emotion 
in his intercourse with Pope, to whose rising celebrity 
he soon became too jealously alive. It was more 
tenderly, but not less keenly, felt by the Spanish 
artist Castillo, a man distinguished by every amiable 
disposition. He was the great painter of Seville ; but 
when some of his nephew Murillo's paintings were 
shown to him, he stood in meek astonishment before 
them, and turning away, he exclaimed with a sigh, Ya 
murio Castillo ! Castillo is no more ! Returning home, 
the stricken genius relinquished his pencil, and pined 
away in hopelessness. The same occurrence happened 
to Pietro Perugino, the master of Raphael, whose 
general character as a painter was so entirely eclipsed by 
his far renowned scholar ; yet, while his real excellences 
in the ease of his attitudes and the mild grace of his 
female countenances have been passed over, it is proba- 
ble that Raphael himself might have caught from them 
his first feelings of ideal beauty. 



WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 217 



CHAPTER XIV. 

Want of mutual esteem, among men of genius, often originates in a 
deficiency of analogous ideas.- — It is not always envy or jealousy 
which induces men of genius to undervalue each other. 

Among men of genius, that want of mutual esteem, 
usually attributed to envy or jealousy, often originates 
in a deficiency of analogous ideas, or of sympathy, in 
the parties. On this principle several curious pheno- 
mena in the history of genius may be explained. 

Every man of genius has a manner of his own ; a 
mode of thinking and a habit of style, and usually de- 
cides on a work as it approximates or varies from his 
own. When one great author depreciates another, his 
depreciation has often no worse source than his own 
taste. The witty Cowley despised the natural Chaucer; 
the austere classical Boileau the rough sublimity of 
Crebillon ; the refining Marivaux the familiar Moliere. 
Fielding ridiculed Richardson, whose manner so strongly 
contrasted with his own; and Richardson contemned 
Fielding, and declared he would not last. Cumberland 
escaped a fit of unforgiveness, not living to read his 
own character by Bishop Watson, whose logical head 
tried the lighter elegancies of that polished man by his 
own nervous genius, destitute of the beautiful in taste. 
There was no envy in the breast of Johnson when he 
advised Mrs. Thrale not to purchase Gray's Letters, as 
trifling and dull, no more than there was in Gray him- 



218 WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM ORIGINATES IN 

self when he sunk the poetical character of Shenstone, 
and debased his simplicity and purity of feeling, by an 
image of ludicrous contempt. I have heard that 
Wilkes, a mere wit and elegant scholar, used to treat 
Gibbon as a mere bookmaker; and applied to that 
philosophical historian the verse by which Voltaire de- 
scribed, with so much caustic facetiousness, the genius 
of the Abbe Trablet : 

" II a compile, compile, compile." 

The deficient sympathy in these men of genius for 
modes of feeling opposite to their own was the real 
cause of their opinions ; and thus it happens that even 
superior genius is so often liable to be unjust and false 
in its decisions. 

The same principle operates still more strikingly in 
the remarkable contempt of men of genius for those 
pursuits which require talents distinct from their own, 
and a cast of mind thrown by nature into another 
mould. Hence we must not be surprised at the poetical 
antipathies of Selden and Locke, as well as Longuerue 
and Buffon. Newton called poetry, " ingenious non- 
sense." On the other side, poets undervalue the pur- 
suits of the antiquary, the naturalist, and the metaphy- 
sician, forming their estimate by their own favourite 
scale of imagination. As we can only understand in 
the degree we comprehend, and feel in the degree in 
which we sympathise, we may be sure that in both 
these cases the parties will be found altogether deficient 
in those qualities of genius which constitute the excel- 
lence of the other. To this cause, rather than to the 
one the friends of Mickle ascribed to Adam Smith, 
namely, a personal dislike to the poet, may we place 



A DEFICIENCY OF ANALOGOUS IDEAS. 219 

the severe mortification which the unfortunate trans- 
lator of Camoens suffered from the person to whom he 
dedicated " The Lusiad." This Duke of Buccleugh 
was the pupil of the great political economist, and so 
little valued an epic poem, that his grace had not even 
the curiosity to open the leaves of the presentation 
copy. 

A professor of polite literature condemned the study 
of botany, as adapted to mediocrity of talent, and only 
demanding patience ; but Linn^us showed how a man 
of genius becomes a creator even in a science which 
seems to depend only on order and method. It will 
not be a question with some whether a man must be 
endowed with the energy and aptitude of genius, to 
excel in antiquarianism, in natural history, and similar 
pursuits. The prejudices raised against the claims of 
such to the honours of genius have probably arisen from 
the secluded nature of their pursuits, and the little 
knowledge which the men of wit and imagination pos- 
sess of these persons, who live in a society of their own. 
On this subject a very curious circumstance has been 
revealed respecting Peiresc, whose enthusiasm for 
science was long felt throughout Europe. His name 
was known in every country, and his death was 
lamented in forty languages ; yet was this great literary 
character unknown to several men of genius in his own 
country; Rochefoucauld declared he had never heard 
of his name, and Malherbe wondered why his death 
created so universal a sensation. 

Madame De Stael was an experienced observer of 
the habits of the literary character, and she has re- 
marked how one student usually revolts from the other 



220 ORIGIN OF THE WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 

when their occupations are different^ because they are a 
reciprocal annoyance. The scholar has nothing to say 
to the poet, the poet to the naturalist ; and even among 
men of science, those who are differently occupied avoid 
each other, taking little interest in what is out of their 
own circle. Thus we see the classes of literature, like 
the planets, revolving as distinct worlds ; and it would 
not be less absurd for the inhabitants of Venus to treat 
with contempt the powers and faculties of those of 
Jupiter, than it is for the men of wit and imagination, 
those of the men of knowledge and curiosity. The wits 
are incapable of exerting the peculiar qualities which 
give a real value to these pursuits, and therefore they 
must remain ignorant of their nature and their result. 

It is not then always envy or jealousy which induces 
men of genius to undervalue each other ; the want of 
sympathy will sufficiently account for the want of judg- 
ment. Suppose Newton, Quinault, and Machiavel, 
accidentally meeting together, and unknown to each 
other, would they not soon have desisted from the vain 
attempt of communicating their ideas ? The philosopher 
would have condemned the poet of the Graces as an 
intolerable trifler, and the author of " The Prince " as 
a dark political spy. Machiavel would have conceived 
Newton to be a dreamer among the stars, and a mere 
almanack-maker among men ; and the other a rhymer, 
nauseously doucereux. Quinault might have imagined 
that he was seated between two madmen. Having 
annoyed each other for some time, they would have 
relieved their ennui by reciprocal contempt, and each 
have parted with a determination to avoid henceforward 
two such disagreeable companions. 



SELF-PRAISE. 



CHAPTER XV. 

Self-praise of genius. — The love of praise instinctive in the nature of 
genius. — A high opinion of themselves necessary for their great 
designs. — The Ancients openly claimed their own praise. — And 
several Moderns. — An author knows more of his merits than his 
readers— And less of his defects. — Authors versatile in their admi. 
ration and their malignity.- 

Vanity, egotism, a strong sense of their own suffi- 
ciency, form another accusation against men of genius ; 
but the complexion of self-praise must alter with the 
occasion ; for the simplicity of truth may appear vanity, 
and the consciousness of superiority seem envy-;— to 
Mediocrity. It is we who do nothing, and cannot even 
imagine anything to be done, who are so much displeased 
with self-lauding, self-love, self-independence, self- 
admiration, which with the man of genius may often be 
nothing but an ostensible modification of the passion of 
glory. 

He who exults in himself is at least in earnest ; but 
he who refuses to receive that praise in public for which 
he has devoted so much labour in his privacy, is not : 
for he is compelled to suppress the very instinct of his 
nature. We censure no man for loving fame, but only 
for showing us how much he is possessed by the passion : 
thus we allow him to create the appetite, but we deny 
him its aliment. Our effeminate minds are the willing 
dupes of what is called the modesty of genius, or, as it 
has been termed, " the polished reserve of modern 



222 LOVE OP PRAISE INSTINCTIVE 

times ;" and this from the selfish principle that it serves 
at least to keep out of the company its painful pre- 
eminence. But this " polished reserve," like something 
as fashionable, the ladies'* rouge, at first appearing with 
rather too much colour, will in the heat of an evening 
die away till the true complexion come out. What 
subterfuges are resorted to by these pretended modest 
men of genius, to extort that praise from their private 
circle which is thus openly denied them ! They have 
been taken by surprise enlarging their own panegyric, 
which might rival Pliny's on Trajan, for care and 
copiousness ; or impudently veiling themselves with the 
transparency of a third person ; or never prefixing their 
name to the volume, which they would not easily for- 
give a friend to pass unnoticed. 

Self-love is a principle of action ; but among no class 
of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this 
principle of life and action as through the whole sensi- 
tive family of genius. It reaches even to a feminine 
susceptibility. The love of praise is instinctive in their 
nature. Praise with them is the evidence of the past 
and the pledge of the future. The generous qualities 
and the virtues of a man of genius are really produced 
by the applause conferred on him. " To him whom the 
world admires, the happiness of the world must be 
dear," said Madame De Stael. Romney, the painter, 
held as a maxim that every diffident artist required 
" almost a daily portion of cheering applause." How 
often do such find their powers paralysed by the depres- 
sion of confidence or the appearance of neglect ! When 
the North American Indians, amid their circle, chant 
their gods and their heroes, the honest savages laud the 



IN THE NATURE OF GENIUS. 223 

living worthies, as well as their departed ; and when, 
as we are told, an auditor hears the shout of his own 
name, he answers by a cry of pleasure and of pride. 
The savage and the man of genius are here true to 
nature, but pleasure and pride in his own name must 
raise no emotion in the breast of genius amidst a polished 
circle. To bring himself down to their usual mediocrity, 
he must start at an expression of regard, and turn away 
even from one of his own votaries. Madame De Stael, 
an exquisite judge of the feelings of the literary cha- 
racter, was aware of this change, which has rather 
occurred in our manners, than in men of genius them- 
selves. " Envy," says that eloquent writer, " among 
the Greeks, existed sometimes between rivals ; it has 
now passed to the spectators ; and by a strange sin- 
gularity the mass of men are jealous of the efforts which 
are tried to add to their pleasures or to merit their 
approbation." 

But this, it seems, is not always the case with men of 
genius, since the accusation we are noticing has been so 
often reiterated. Take from some that supreme con- 
fidence in themselves, that pride of exultation, and you 
crush the germ of their excellence. Many vast designs 
must have perished in the conception, had not their 
authors breathed this vital air of self-delight, this cre- 
ative spirit, so operative in great undertakings. We 
have recently seen this principle in the literary character 
unfold itself in the life of the late Bishop of Landaff. 
Whatever he did, he felt it was done as a master ; 
whatever he wrote, it was, as he once declared, the best 
work on the subject yet written. With this feeling he 
emulated Cicero in retirement or in action. " When I 



224 LOVE OF PRAISE INSTINCTIVE. 

am dead, you will not soon meet with another John 
Hunter," said the great anatomist to one of his gar- 
rulous friends. An apology is formed by his biographer 
for relating the fact, but the weakness is only in the 
apology. When Hogarth was engaged in his work of 
the Marriage a-la-Mode, he said to Reynolds, " I shall 
very soon gratify the world with such a sight as they 
have never seen equalled." — " One of his foibles," adds 
Northcote, " it is well known, was the excessive high 
opinion he had of his own abilities." So pronounced 
Northcote, who had not an atom of his genius. Was 
it a, foible in Hogarth to cast the glove, when he always 
more than redeemed the pledge ? Corneille has given 
a very noble full-length of the sublime egotism which 
accompanied him through life * ; but I doubt, if we had 
any such author in the present day, whether he would 
dare to be so just to himself, and so hardy to the public. 
The self-praise of Buffon at least equalled his genius; 
and the inscription beneath his statue in the library of 
the Jardin des Plantes, which I have been told was 
raised to him in his lifetime, exceeds all panegyric ; — it 
places him alone in nature, as the first and the last 
interpreter of her works. He said of the great geniuses 
of modern ages, that " there were not more than five ; 
Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and Myself." 
With this spirit he conceived and terminated his great 
works, and sat in patient meditation at his desk for half 
a century, till all Europe, even in a state of war, bowed 
to the modern Pliny. 

Nor is the vanity of Buffon, and Voltaire, and 

* See it versified in Curiosilies of Literature. 



HIGH SELF-OPINION. 225 

Rousseau purely national ; for men of genius in all ages 
have expressed a consciousness of the internal force of 
genius. No one felt this self- exultation more potent 
than our Hobbes ; who has indeed, in his controversy 
with Wallis, asserted that there may be nothing more 
just than self-commendation # . There is a curious 
passage in the Purgatorio of Dante, where describing 
the transitory nature of literary fame, and the variable- 
ness of human opinion, the poet alludes with confidence 
to his own future greatness. Of two authors of the 
name of Guido, the one having eclipsed the other, the 
poet writes : 

Cos! ha tolto l'uno all' altro Guido 

La gloria della lingua ; e forse e nato 

Chi V uno e P altro caccera di nido. 

Thus has one Guido from the other snatch'd 

The letter'd pride ; and he perhaps is bom 

Who shall drive either from their nest\. 

De Thou, one of the most noble-minded of historians, in 
the Memoirs of his own life, composed in the third 
person, has surprised and somewhat puzzled the critics, 
by that frequent distribution of self-commendation 
which they knew not how to reconcile with the modesty 
and gravity with which the president was so amply 
endowed. After his great and solemn labour, amidst 
the injustice of his persecutors, this eminent man had 
sufficient experience of his real worth to assert it. 
Kepler, amidst his sublime discoveries, looks down like 
a superior being on other men. He breaks forth in 
glory and daring egotism : "I dare insult mankind by 
confessing that I am he who has turned science to 

* See Quarrels of Authors, vol. iii. p. 113. 
f Cary. 






226 THE ANCIENTS OPENLY 



advantage. If I am pardoned, I shall rejoice ; if blamed, 
I shall endure it. The die is cast ; I have written this 
book, and whether it be read by posterity or by my 
contemporaries is of no consequence ; it may well wait for 
a reader during one century, when God himself during 
six thousand years has not sent an observer like myself." 
He truly predicts that " his discoveries would be verified 
in succeeding ages;" and prefers his own glory to the 
possession of the electorate of Saxony. It was this 
solitary majesty, this futurity of their genius, which 
hovered over the sleepless pillow of Bacon, of Newton, 
and of Montesquieu ; of Ben Jonson, of Milton, and 
Corneille ; and of Michael Angelo. Such men anticipate 
their contemporaries ; they know they are creators, long 
before they are hailed as such by the tardy consent of 
the public. These men stand on Pisgah heights, and 
for them the sun shines on a land which none yet view 
but themselves. 

There is an admirable essay in Plutarch, " On the 
manner by which we may praise ourselves without 
exciting envy in others." The sage seems to consider 
self-praise as a kind of illustrious impudence, and has 
one very striking image : he compares these eulogists to 
famished persons, who finding no other food, in their 
rage have eaten their own flesh, and thus shockingly 
nourished themselves by their own substance. He allows 
persons in high office to praise themselves, if by this 
tliey can repel calumny and accusation, as did Pericles 
before the Athenians : but the Romans found fault with 
Cicero, who so frequently reminded them of his exertions 
in the conspiracy of Catiline ; while, when Scipio told 
them that " They should not presume to judge of a 



CLAIMED THEIR OWN PRAISE. 227 

citizen to whom they owed the power of judging all 
men," the people covered themselves with flowers, and 
followed him to the capitol to join in a thanksgiving to 
Jove. u Cicero," adds Plutarch, " praised himself with- 
out necessity. Scipio was in personal danger, and this 
took away what is odious in self-praise." An author 
seems sometimes to occupy the situation of a person in 
high office ; and there may be occasions when with a 
noble simplicity, if he appeal to his works, of which all 
men may judge, he may be permitted to assert or to 
maintain his claims. It has at least been the practice 
of men of genius, for in this very essay we find Timo- 
theus, Euripides, and Pindar censured, though they 
deserved all the praise they gave themselves. 

Epicurus, writing to a minister of state, declares, 
" If you desire glory, nothing can bestow it more than 
the letters I write to you : " and Seneca, in quoting 
these words, adds, " What Epicurus promised to his 
friend, that, my Lucilius, I promise you." Orna me ! 
was the constant cry of Cicero ; and he desires the 
historian Lucceius to write separately the conspiracy 
of Catiline, and to publish quickly, that while he yet 
lived he might taste the sweetness of his glory. Horace 
and Ovid were equally sensible to their immortality ; 
but what modern poet would be tolerated with such an 
avowal ? Yet Dryden honestly declares that it was 
better for him to own this failing of vanity, than the 
world to do it for him ; and adds, " For what other 
reason have I spent my life in so unprofitable a study ? 
Why am I grown old in seeking so barren a reward as 
fame ? The same parts and application which have made 
me a poet, might have raised me to any honours of the 
Q2 



228 AN AUTHOR KNOWS MORE OF 

gown." "Was not Cervantes very sensible to his own 
merits when a rival started up ? and did he not assert 
them too, and distinguish his own work by a handsome 
compliment ? Lope de Vega celebrated his own poetic 
powers under the pseudonyme of a pretended editor, 
Thomas Barguillos. I regret that his noble biographer, 
than whom no one can more truly sympathise with the 
emotions of genius, has censured the bard for his 
querulous or his intrepid tone, and for the quaint conceit 
of his title-page, where his detractor is introduced as 
beetle in a vega or garden, attacking its flowers, but 
expiring in the very sweetness he would injure. The 
inscription under Boileaus portrait, which gives a 
preference to the French satirist over Juvenal and 
Horace, is known to have been written by himself. Nor 
was Butler less proud of his own merits ; for he has 
done ample justice to his Hudibras, and traced out, 
with great self-delight, its variety of excellences. 
Richardson, the novelist, exhibits one of the most 
striking instances of what is called literary vanity, the 
delight of an author in his works; he has pointed out 
all the beauties of his three great works, in various 
manners*. He always taxed a visitor by one of his 
long letters. It was this intense self-delight which 
produced his voluminous labours. 

There are certain authors whose very existence seems 
to require a high conception of their own talents ; and 
who must, as some animals appear to do, furnish the 
means of life out of their own substance. These men 
of genius open their career with peculiar tastes, or with 

* I have observed them in Curiosities of Literature. 



LS 

a 



HIS MERITS THAN HIS READERS. 229 

a predilection for some great work of no immediate 
interest ; in a word, with many unpopular dispositions. 
Yet we see them magnanimous, though defeated, pro- 
ceeding with the public feeling against them. At 
length we view them ranking with their rivals. With- 
out having yielded up their peculiar tastes or their 
incorrigible viciousness, they have, however, heightened 
their individual excellencies. No human opinion can 
change their self-opinion. Alive to the consciousness 
of their powers, their pursuits are placed above impedi- 
ment, and their great views can suffer no contraction ; 
jpossunt quia posse videntur. Such was the language 
Lord Bacon once applied to himself when addressing a 
king. " I know," said the great philosopher, " that I 
am censured of some conceit of my ability or worth ; 
but I pray your majesty impute it to desire possunt 
quia posse videntur." These men of genius bear a 
charmed mail on their breast ; " hopeless, not heartless," 
may be often the motto of their ensign ; and if they do 
not always possess reputation, they still look onwards 
for fame ; for these do not necessarily accompany each 
other. 

An author is more sensible of his own merits, as he 
also is of his labour, which is invisible to all others, 
while he is unquestionably much less sensible to his 
defects, than most of his readers. The author not only 
comprehends his merits better, because they have passed 
through a long process in his mind, but he is familiar 
with every part, while the reader has but a vague 
notion of the whole. "Why does an excellent work, 
by repetition, rise in interest ? Because in obtaining 
this gradual intimacy with an author, we appear to 



230 AN AUTHOR KNOWS MORE OF 

recover half the genius which we had lost on a first 
perusal. The work of genius too is associated, in the 
mind of the author, with much more than it contains ; 
and the true supplement, which he only can give, has 
not always accompanied the work itself. We find great 
men often greater than the books they write. Ask the 
man of genius if he have written all that he wished to 
have written ? Has he satisfied himself in this work, for 
which you accuse his pride ? Has he dared what required 
intrepidity to achieve ? Has he evaded difficulties which 
he should have overcome ? The mind of the reader has 
the limits of a mere recipient, while that of the author, 
even after his work, is teeming with creation. " On 
many occasions, my soul seems to know more than it 
can say, and to be endowed with a mind by itself, far 
superior to the mind I really have," said Marivaux, 
with equal truth and happiness. 

With these explanations of what are called the vanity 
and egotism of Genius, be it remembered, that the 
sense of their own sufficiency is assumed by men at 
their own risk. The great man who thinks greatly of 
himself, is not diminishing that greatness in heaping 
fuel on his fire. It is indeed otherwise with his un- 
lucky brethren, with whom an illusion of literary vanity 
may end in the aberrations of harmless madness ; as it 
happened to Percival Stockdale. After a parallel 
between himself and Charles XII. of Sweden, he con- 
cludes that " some parts will be to his advantage, and 
some to mine;" but in regard to fame, the main object 
between himself and Charles XII., Percival imagined 
that " his own will not probably take its fixed and im- 
moveable station, and shine with its expanded and 



HIS OWN MERITS THAN HIS READERS. 231 

permanent splendour, till it consecrates his ashes, till it 
illumines his tomb." After this, the reader, who may 
never have heard of the name of Percival Stockdale, 
must be told that there exist his own " Memoirs of his 
Life and Writings *." The memoirs of a scribbler who 
saw the prospects of life close on him while he imagined 
that his contemporaries were unjust, are instructive to 
literary men. To correct, and to be corrected, should 
be their daily practice, that they may be taught not 
only to exult in themselves, but to fear themselves. 

It is hard to refuse these men of genius that aura 
vitalis, of which they are so apt to be liberal to others. 
Are they not accused of the meanest adulations ? When 
a young writer experiences the notice of a person of 
some eminence, he has expressed himself in language 
which transcends that of mortality. A finer reason 
than reason itself, inspires it. The sensation has been 
expressed with all its fulness, by Milton : 

" The debt immense of endless gratitude." 

Who ever pays an " immense debt," in small sums ? 
Every man of genius has left such honourable traces of 
his private affections ; from Locke, whose dedication 
of his great work is more adulative than could be ima- 
gined from a temperate philosopher, to Churchill, whose 
warm eulogiums on his friends beautifully contrast with 
his satire. Even in advanced age, the man of genius 
dwells on the praise he caught in his youth from vete- 
ran genius, which, like the aloe, will flower at the end 
of life. When Yirgil was yet a youth, it is said that 

* I have sketched a character of Percival Stockdale, in Calamities 
of Authors; it was taken ad vivum. 



232 AUTHORS ARE VERSATILE IN THEIR 

Cicero heard one of his eclogues, and exclaimed with 
his accustomed warmth, 

Magna spes altera Romse ! 

" The second hope of mighty Rome !" intending by the 
first either himself or Lucretius. The words of Cicero 
were the secret honey on which the imagination of 
Virgil fed for many a year ; for in one of his latest 
productions, the twelfth book of the iEneid, he applies 
these very words to Ascanius. So long had the accents 
of Cicero's praise lingered in the poet's ear ! 

This extreme susceptibility of praise in men of genius 
is the same exuberant sensibility which is so alive to 
censure. I have elsewhere fully shown how some have 
died of criticism # . The self-love of genius is perhaps 
much more delicate than gross. 

But this fatal susceptibility is the cause of that 
strange facility which has often astonished the world, 
by the sudden transitions of sentiment which literary 
characters have frequently exhibited. They have eulo- 
gised men and events which they had reprobated, and 
reprobated what they had eulogised. The recent history 
of political revolutions has furnished some monstrous 
examples of this subservience to power. Guicciardini 
records one of his own times, which has been often 
repeated in ours. Jovianus Pontanus, the secretary 
of Ferdinand, King of Naples, was also selected to be 
the tutor of the prince, his son. When Charles VIII. 
of France invaded Naples, Pontanus was deputed to 
address the French conqueror. To render himself 
agreeable to the enemies of his country, he did not 

* In Curiosities of Literature. 



ADMIRATION AND MALIGNITY. 233 

avoid expatiating on the demerits of his expelled 
patrons : " So difficult it is," adds the grave and digni- 
fied historian, " for ourselves to observe that moderation 
and those precepts which no man knew better than 
Pontanus ; w T ho was endowed with such copious litera- 
ture, and composed with such facility in moral philoso- 
phy, and possessed such acquirements in universal 
erudition that he had made himself a prodigy to the eye 
of the world * ." The student, occupied by abstract 
pursuits, may not indeed always take much interest in 
the change of dynasties ; and perhaps the famous can- 
celled dedication to Cromwell, by the learned Orientalist 
Dr. Castell, who supplied its place by another to 
Charles II., ought not to be placed to the account of 
political tergiversation. But the versatile adoration of 
the continental s^avans of the republic or the monarchy, 
the consul or the emperor, has inflicted an unhealing 
wound on the literary character ; since, like Pontanus, 
to gratify their new master, they had not the greatness 
of mind to save themselves from ingratitude to their old. 

Their vengeance, as quickly kindled, lasts as long. 
Genius is a dangerous gift of nature. The same effer- 
vescent passions form a Catiline or a Cicero. Plato 
lays great stress on his man of genius possessing the 
most vehement passions, but, he adds reason to restrain 
them. It is Imagination which by their side stands as 
their good or evil spirit. Glory or infamy is but a 
different direction of the same passion. 

How are we to describe symptoms which, flowing 
from one source, yet show themselves in such opposite 

* Guicciardini, Book II. 



234 AUTHORS ARE VERSATILE IN THEIR 

forms as those of an intermittent fever, a silent delirium, 
or a horrid hypochondriasm ? Have we no other opiate 
to still the agony, no other cordial to warm the heart, 
than the great ingredient in the recipe of Plato's vision- 
ary man of genius — calm reason ? Must men, who so 
rarely obtain this tardy panacea, remain with all their 
tortured and torturing passions about them, often self- 
disgusted, self-humiliated ? The enmities of genius are 
often connected with their morbid imagination. These 
originate in casual slights, or in unguarded expressions, 
or in hasty opinions, or in witty derision, or even in 
the obtruding goodness of tender admonition. The. 
man of genius broods over the phantom that darkens 
his feelings : he multiplies a single object ; he magnifies 
the smallest ; and suspicions become certainties. It is 
in this unhappy state that he sharpens his vindictive 
fangs, in a libel called his " Memoirs," or in another 
species of public outrage, styled a " Criticism." 

We are told, that Comines the historian, when re- 
siding at the court of the Count de Charolois, afterwards 
Duke of Burgundy, one day returning from hunting, 
with inconsiderate jocularity sat down before the Count, 
and ordered the prince to pull off his boots. The Count 
would not affect greatness, and having executed his 
commission, in return for the princely amusement, the 
Count dashed the boot on Comines's nose, which bled ; 
and from that time, he was mortified at the court of. 
Burgundy, by retaining the nick- name of the booted head. 
The blow rankled in the heart of the man of genius, 
and the Duke of Burgundy has come down to us in 
Comines' Memoirs, blackened by his vengeance. Many, 
unknown to their readers, like Comines, have had a 



ADMIRATION AND MALIGNITY. 235 

booted head ; but the secret poison is distilled on their 
lasting page, as we have recently witnessed in Lord 
Waldeo-rave's Memoirs. Swift's perpetual malevolence 
to Dryden originated in that great poet's prediction, 
that " cousin Swift would never be a poet;" a predic- 
tion which the wit never could forget. I have else- 
where fully written a tale of literary hatred, where is 
seen a man of genius, in the character of Gilbert 
Stewart, devoting a whole life to harassing the indus- 
try or the genius which he himself could not attain *. 

A living Italian poet, of great celebrity, when at the 
court of Rome, presented a magnificent edition of his 
poetry to Pius VI. The bard, Mr. Hobhouse informs 
us, lived not in the good graces of his Holiness, and 
although the Pontiff accepted the volume, he did not 
forbear a severity of remark which could not fall un- 
heeded by the modern poet; for on this occasion, 
repeating some verses of Metastasio, his Holiness drily 
added, " No one now-a-days writes like that great 
poet." Never was this to be erased from memory : the 
stifled resentment of Monti vehemently broke forth at 
the moment the French carried off Pius VI. from 
Rome. Then the long indignant secretary poured forth 
an invective more severe " against the great harlot," 
than was ever traced by a Protestant pen — Monti now 
invoked the rock of Sardinia; the poet bade it fly from 
•its base, that the last of monsters might not find even a 
tomb to shelter him. Such was the curse of a poet on 
his former patron, now an object of misery — a return 
for " placing him below Metastasio !" 

* See Calamities of Authors. 



236 MALIGNITY OF AUTHORS. 

The French Revolution affords illustrations of the 
worst human passions. When the wretched Collot 
D'Herbois was tossed up in the storm, to the summit 
of power, a monstrous imagination seized him; he 
projected razing the city of Lyons and massacring its 
inhabitants. He had even the heart to commence, and 
to continue this conspiracy against human nature; the 
ostensible crime was royalism, but the secret motive is 
said to have been literary vengeance ! As wretched 
a poet and actor as a man, D'Herbois had been 
hissed off the theatre at Lyons, and to avenge that 
ignominy, he had meditated over this vast and remorse- 
less crime. Is there but one Collot D'Herbois in the 
universe ? 

Long since this was written, a fact has been recorded 
of Chenier the French dramatic poet, which parallels 
the horrid tale of Collot D'Herbois, which some have 
been willing to doubt from its enormity. It is said, 
that this monster, in the revolutionary period, when he 
had the power to save the life of his brother Andre, 
while his father, prostrate before a wretched son, was 
imploring for the life of an innocent brother, remained 
silent ; it is further said, that he appropriated to him- 
self a tragedy which he found among his brother's 
manuscripts. " Fratricide from literary jealousy," ob- 
serves the relator of this anecdote, " was a crime reserved 
for a modern French revolutionist *." There are some 
pathetic stanzas which Andre was composing in his last 
moments, when awaiting his fate ; the most pathetic of 
all stanzas is that one which he left unfinished — 

* Edinburgh Review, XXXV. 159. 



LITERARY MALIGNITY. 237 

Peut-etre, avant que l'heure en cercle prornenee 

Ait pose, sur l'ernail brillant 
Dans les soixantc pas ou sa route est bornee 

Son pied sonore et vigilant, 
Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupiere — 

At this unfinished stanza, was the pensive poet sum- 
moned to the guillotine ! 



238 DEFECTS OF GREAT COMPOSITIONS 



CHAPTER XVI. 

The domestic life of genius. — Defects of great compositions attributed 
to domestic infelicities. — The home of the literary character should 
be the abode of repose and silence. — Of the Father. — Of the Mother. 
— Of family genius. — Men of genius not more respected than other 
men in their domestic circle. — The cultivators of science and art do 
not meet on equal terms with others, in domestic life. — Their neglect 
of those around them. — Often accused of imaginary crimes. 

When the temper and the leisure of the literary 
character are alike broken, even his best works, the too 
faithful mirrors of his state of mind, will participate in 
its inequalities ; and surely the incubations of genius in 
its delicate and shadowy combinations, are not less 
sensible in their operation than the composition of sono- 
rous bodies, where, while the warm metal is settling in 
the mould, even an unusual vibration of the air during 
the moment of fusion, will injure the tone. 

Some of the conspicuous blemishes of several great 
compositions may be attributed to the domestic infelici- 
ties of their authors. The desultory life of Camoens is 
imagined to be perceptible in the deficient connexion of 
his epic ; and Milton's blindness and divided family 
prevented that castigating criticism, which otherwise 
had erased passages which have escaped from his revis- 
ing hand. He felt himself in the situation of his Sam- 
son Agonistes, whom he so pathetically describes as, 

u His foes' derision, captive, poor, and blind." 

Even Locke complains of his " discontinued way of 



ATTRIBUTABLE TO DOMESTIC INFELICITIES. 239 

writing/' and " writing by incoherent parcels," from 
the avocations of a busy and unsettled life, which 
undoubtedly produced a deficiency of method in the 
disposition of the materials of his great work. The 
careless rapid lines of Dryden are justly attributed to 
his distress, and indeed he pleads for his inequalities 
from his domestic circumstances. Johnson often 
silently, but eagerly, corrected the Ramblers in their 
successive editions, of which so many had been des- 
patched in haste. The learned Greaves offered some 
excuses for his errors in his edition of Abulfeda, from 
" his being five years encumbered with law-suits and 
diverted from his studies." When at length he returned 
to them, he expresses his surprise " at the pains he had 
formerly undergone," but of which he now felt himself 
" unwilling, he knew not how, of again undergoing." 
Goldoni, when at the bar, abandoned his comic talent 
for several years ; and having resumed it, his first 
comedy totally failed : " My head," says he, " was 
occupied with my professional employment ; I was 
uneasy in mind and in bad humour." A law-suit, a 
bankruptcy, a domestic feud, or an indulgence in crimi- 
nal or in foolish pursuits, have chilled the fervour of 
imagination, scattered into fragments many a noble 
design, and paralysed the finest genius. The distrac- 
tions of Guido's studies from his passion for gaming, 
and of Parmegiano's for alchemy, have been traced in 
their works, which are often hurried over and unequal. 
It is curious to observe, that Cumberland attributes 
the excellence of his comedy, " The West Indian," to 
the peculiarly happy situation in which he found himself 
at the time of its composition, free from the incessant 



240 DEFECTS OF GREAT COMPOSITIONS 

avocations which had crossed him in the writing of c The 
Brothers.' " I was master of my time, my mind was 
free, and I was happy in the society of the dearest 
friends I had on earth. The calls of office, the cavillings 
of angry rivals, and the gibings of newspaper critics, 
could not reach me on the banks of the Shannon, where 
all within doors was love and affection. In no other 
period of my life have the same happy circumstances 
combined to cheer me in any of my literary labours." 

The best years of Mengs' life were embittered by his 
father, a poor artist, and who, with poorer feelings, 
converted his home into a prison-house, forced his son 
into the slavery of stipulated task-work, while bread 
and water were the only fruits of the fine arts. In this 
domestic persecution, the son contracted those morose 
and saturnine habits, which in after-life marked the 
character of the ungenial Mengs. Alonso Cano, a 
celebrated Spanish painter, would have carried his art 
to perfection had not the unceasing persecution of the 
inquisitors entirely deprived him of that tranquillity so 
necessary to the very existence of art. Ovid, in exile 
on the barren shores of Tomos, deserted by his genius, 
in his copious Tristia loses much of the luxuriance of 
his fancy. 

"We have a remarkable evidence of domestic unhap- 
piness annihilating the very faculty of genius itself, in 
the case of Dr. Brook Taylor, the celebrated author 
of the " Linear Perspective." This great mathematician 
in early life distinguished himself as an inventor in 
science, and the most sanguine hopes of his future dis- 
coveries were raised both at home and abroad. Two 
unexpected events in domestic life extinguished his 



ATTRIBUTABLE TO DOMESTIC INFELICITIES. 241 

inventive faculties. After the loss of two wives, whom 
he regarded with no common affection, he became un- 
fitted for profound studies ; he carried his own personal 
despair into his favourite objects of pursuit, and aban- 
doned them. The inventor of the most original work, 
suffered the last fifteen years of his life to drop away, 
without hope, and without exertion ; nor is this a solitary 
instance, where a man of genius deprived of the idolised 
partner of his existence, has no longer been able to find 
an object in his studies, and where even fame itself has 
ceased to interest. The reason which Rousseau alleges 
for the cynical spleen which so frequently breathes forth 
in his works, shows how the domestic character of the 
man of genius leaves itself in his productions. After 
describing the infelicity of his domestic affairs occasioned 
by the mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both 
women of the lowest class and the worst dispositions, he 
adds, on this wretched marriage, " these unexpected 
disagreeable events, in a state of my own choice, plunged 
me into literature, to give a new direction and diversion 
to my mind ; and in all my first works, I scattered that 
bilious humour which had occasioned this very occupa- 
tion." Our author s character in his works was the 
very opposite to the one in which he appeared to these 
low people. Feeling his degradation among them, for 
they treated his simplicity as utter silliness, his personal 
timidity assumed a tone of boldness and originality in 
his writings, while a strong personal sense of shame 
heightened his causticity, and he delighted to contemn 
that urbanity in which he had never shared and which 
he knew not to practise. His miserable subservience to 
these people was the real cause of his oppressed spirit 

R 



the 
the 



242 OF A PASSION FOR 

calling out for some undefined freedom in society ; and 
thus the real Rousseau, with all his disordered feelings, 
only appeared in his writings. The secrets of his heart 
were confided to his pen. 

" The painting-room must be like Eden before th 
fall ; no joyless turbulent passions must enter there, 
exclaims the enthusiast Richardson. The home of the 
literary character should be the abode of repose and of 
silence. There must he look for the feasts of study, in 
progressive and alternate labours ; a taste " which," says 
Gibbon, " I would not exchange for the treasures of 
India." Rousseau had always a work going on, for 
rainy days and spare hours, such as his dictionary of 
music : a variety of works never tired ; it was the 
single one which exhausted. Metastasio looks with 
delight on his variety, which resembled the fruits in the 
garden of Armida, 

E mentve spunta l'un, l'altro mature. 

While one matures, the other buds and blows. 

Nor is it always fame, or any lower motive, which 
may induce the literary character to hold an unwearied 
pen. Another equally powerful exists, which must 
remain inexplicable to him who knows not to escape 
from the listlessness of life — it is the passion for literary 
occupation. He whose eye can only measure the space 
occupied by the voluminous labours of the elder Pliny, 
of a Mazzuchelli, a Muratori, a Montfaucon, and a 
Gough, all men who laboured from the love of labour, 
and can see nothing in that space but the industry 
which filled it, is like him who only views a city at 
a distance — the streets and the edifices, and all the life 
and population within, he can never know. These 



LITERARY OCCUPATION. 243 

literary characters projected their works as so many- 
schemes to escape from uninteresting pursuits ; and, in 
these folios, how many evils of life did they bury, while 
their happiness expanded with their volume ! Aulus 
Gellius desired to live no longer than he was able to 
retain the faculty of writing and observing. The 
literary character must grow as impassioned with his 
subject as iElian with his History of Animals ; " wealth 
and honour I might have obtained at the courts of 
princes ; but I preferred the delight of multiplying my 
knowledge. I am aware that the avaricious and the 
ambitious will accuse me of folly, but I have always 
found most pleasure in observing the nature of animals, 
studying their character, and writing their history." 

Even with those who have acquired their celebrity, 
the love of literary labour is not diminished, a circum- 
stance recorded by the younger Pliny of Livy. In a pre- 
face to one of his lost books, that historian had said that 
he had obtained sufficient glory by his former writings 
on the Roman history, and might now repose in silence ; 
but his mind was so restless and so abhorrent of indo- 
lence, that it only felt its existence in literary exertion. 
In a similar situation the feeling was fully experienced 
by Hume. Our philosopher completed his History 
neither for money nor for fame, having then more than 
a sufficiency of both — but chiefly to indulge a habit as 
a resource against indolence*. These are the minds 
which are without hope, if they are without occupation. 

Amidst the repose and silence of study, delightful to 
the literary character are the soothing interruptions of 

* This appears in one of his interesting letters first published in the 
Literary Gazette, Oct. 20, 1821. 

r2 



244 GRATITUDE OF GENIUS 

the voices of those whom he loves, recalling him from 
his abstractions into social existence. These re-animate 
his languor, and moments of inspiration are caught in 
the emotions of affection, when a father or a friend, a 
wife, a daughter, or a sister, become the participators 
of his own tastes, the companions of his studies, and 
identify their happiness with his fame. A beautiful 
incident in the domestic life of literature is one which 
Morellet has revealed of Marmontel. In presenting 
his collected works to his wife, she discovered that the 
author had dedicated his volumes to herself; but the 
dedication was not made painful to her modesty, for it 
was not a public one. Nor was it so concise as to be 
mistaken for a compliment. The theme was copious, 
for the heart overflowed in the pages consecrated to 
her domestic virtues; and Marmontel left it as a 
record, that their children might learn the gratitude of 
their father, and know the character of their mother, 
when the writer should be no more. Many readers 
were perhaps surprised to find in Necker's Compte 
rendu au Roi, a political and financial work, a great 
and lovely character of domestic excellence in his wife. 
This was more obtrusive than Marmontel's private dedi- 
cation ; yet it was not the less sincere. If Necker failed 
in the cautious reserve of private feelings, who will cen- 
sure? Nothing seems misplaced which the heart dictates. 
If Horace were dear to his friends, he declares they 
owed him to his father. 



purus et insons 



(Ut me collaudem) si vivo et cams amicis, 
Causa fuit Pater his. 
If pure and innocent, if dear (forgive 
These little praises) to my friends I live, 
My father was the cause. 






FOR PARENTAL INSTRUCTION. 245 

This intelligent father, an obscure tax-gatherer, discovered 
the propensity of Horace's mind ; for he removed the 
boy of genius from a rural seclusion to the metropolis, 
anxiously attending on him to his various masters. 
Grotius, like Horace, celebrated in verse his grati- 
tude to his excellent father, who had formed him 
not only to be a man of learning but a great cha- 
racter. Vitruvius pours forth a grateful prayer to the 
memory of his parents, who had instilled into his soul 
a love for literary and philosophical subjects ; and it is 
an amiable trait in Plutarch to have introduced his 
father in the Symposiacs as an elegant critic and 
moralist, and his brother Lamprias, whose sweetness of 
disposition inclining to cheerful raillery, the Sage of 
Cheronsea has immortalized. The father of Gibbon 
urged him to literary distinction, and the dedication of 
the " Essay on Literature' 1 to that father, connected 
with his subsequent labour, shows the force of the 
excitement. The father of Pope lived long enough to 
witness his son's celebrity. 

" Tears such as tender fathers shed, 
Warm from my eyes descend, 
For joy, to think when I am dead, 

My son shall have mankind his Friend." * 

The son of Buffon one day surprised his father by the 
sight of a column, which he had raised to the memory 
of his father's eloquent genius. " It will do you honour," 
observed the Gallic sage. And when that son in the 
revolution was led to the guillotine, he ascended in 

* These lines have heen happily applied by Mr. Bowles to the father 
of Pope. — The poet's domestic affections were as permanent as they 
were strong. 



246 GRATITUDE OF GENIUS 

silence, so impressed with his father's fame, that he only 
told the people, " I am the son of Buffon ! " 

Fathers absorbed in their occupations can but rarely 
attract their offspring. The first durable impressions 
of our moral existence come from the mother. The 
first prudential wisdom to which Genius listens falls 
from her lips, and only her caresses can create the 
moments of tenderness. The earnest discernment of a 
mother s love survives in the imagination of manhood. 
The mother of Sir William Jones, having formed a 
plan for the education of her son, withdrew from great 
connexions that she might live only for that son. Her 
great principle of education, was to excite by curiosity ; 
the result could not fail to be knowledge. " Read, and 
you will know," she constantly replied to her filial 
pupil. And we have his own acknowledgment, that 
to this maxim, which produced the habit of study, 
he was indebted for his future attainments. Kant, 
the German metaphysician, was always fond of declaring 
that he owed to the ascendancy of his mothers cha-^ 
racter, the severe inflexibility of his moral principles. 
The mother of Burns kindled his genius by reciting the 
old Scottish ballads, while to his father he attributed 
his less pleasing cast of character. Bishop Watson 
traced to the affectionate influence of his mother, the 
religious feelings which he confesses he inherited from 
her. The mother of Edgeworth, confined through 
life to her apartment, was the only person who studied 
his constitutional volatility. When he hastened to her 
death-bed, the last imperfect accents of that beloved 
voice reminded him of the past and warned him of 
the future, and he declares — that voice " had a happy 



FOR PARENTAL INSTRUCTION. 247 

influence on his habits," as happy at least, as his own 
volatile nature would allow. " To the manner in which 
my mother formed me at an early age," said Napoleon, 
" I principally owe my subsequent elevation. My opinion 
is, that the future good or bad conduct of a child en- 
tirely depends upon the mother." 

There is this remarkable in the strong affections of the 
mother, in the formation of the literary character, that, 
without even partaking of, or sympathising with the 
pleasures the child is fond of, the mother will often 
cherish those first decided tastes merely from the 
delight of promoting the happiness of her son ; so that 
that genius, which some would produce on a precon- 
ceived system, or implant by stratagem, or enforce by 
application, with her may be only the watchful labour 
of love. One of our most eminent antiquaries has often 
assured me that his great passion, and I may say his 
genius, for his curious knowledge and his vast researches, 
he attributes to maternal affection. When his early taste 
for these studies was thwarted by the very different one 
of his fathers, the mother silently supplied her son 
with the sort of treasures he languished for, blessing 
the knowledge, which indeed she could not share with 
him, but which she beheld imparting happiness to her 
youthful antiquary. 

There is, what may be called, family genius. In 
the home of a man of genius is diffused an electrical 
atmosphere, and his own pre-eminence strikes out 
talents in all. " The active pursuits of my father," 
says the daughter of Edgeworth, " spread an animation 
through the house by connecting children with all that 
was going on, and allowing them to join in thought and 



248 FAMILY- GENIUS. 

conversation ; sympathy and emulation excited mental 
exertion in the most agreeable manner." Evelyn, in 
his beautiful retreat at Saye's Court, had inspired hii 
family with that variety of tastes which he himself was 
spreading throughout the nation. His son translated 
Rapin s " Gardens," which poem the father proudly 
preserved in his " Sylva ; " his lady, ever busied in his 
study, excelled in the arts her husband loved, and de- 
signed the frontispiece to his Lucretius : she was the 
cultivator of their celebrated garden, which served as 
u an example" of his great work on " forest trees." 
Cowley, who has commemorated Evelyn s love of books 
and gardens, has delightfully applied them to his lady, 
in whom says the bard, Evelyn meets both pleasures : 

" The fairest garden in her looks, 
And in her mind the wisest books." 

The house of Haller resembled a temple consecrated 
to science and the arts, and the votaries were his own 
family. The universal acquirements of Haller were 
possessed in some degree by every one under his roof; 
and their studious delight in transcribing manuscripts, 
in consulting authors, in botanising, drawing and co~ 
louring the plants under his eye, formed occupations 
which made the daughters happy and the sons eminent. 
The painter Stella inspired his family to copy his 
fanciful inventions, and the playful graver of Claudine 
Stella, his niece, animated his " Sports of Children." I 
have seen a print of Coypel in his studio, and by his 
side his little daughter, who is intensely watching the 
progress of her father's pencil. The artist has represented 
himself in the act of suspending his labour to look on 
his child. At that moment, his thoughts were divided 



3 

s 



FAMILY-GENIUS. 249 

between two objects of his love. The character, and 
the works of the late Elizabeth Hamilton, were formed 
entirely by her brother. Admiring the man she loved, 
she imitated what she admired ; and while the brother 
was arduously completing the version of the Persian 
Hedaya, the sister, who had associated with his morning 
tasks and his evening conversations, was recalling all 
the ideas, and portraying her fraternal master in her 
" Hindoo Rajah." 

Nor are there wanting instances where this family- 
genius has been carried down through successive gene- 
rations : the volume of the father has been continued 
by a son, or a relative. The history of the family of 
the Zwingers is a combination of studies and inherited 
tastes. Theodore published, in 1097, a folio herbal, of 
which his son Frederic gave an enlarged edition in 
1744; and the family was honoured by their name 
having been given to a genus of plants dedicated to 
their memory, and known in botany by the name of 
the Zwingera. In history and in literature, the family 
name was equally eminent ; the same Theodore con- 
tinued a great work, " The Theatre of Human Life," 

i which had been begun by his father-in-law, and which 

i for the third time was enlarged by another son. Among 
the historians of Italy, it is delightful to contemplate 
this family-genius transmitting itself with unsullied 
probity among the three Villanis, and the Malaspinis, 

j and the two Portas. The history of the learned 
family of the Stephens presents a dynasty of literature, 

| and to distinguish the numerous members they have 
been designated as Henry I., and Henry II., as Robert 
I., the II., and the III. Our country may exult in 



250 MEN OF GENIUS NOT REVERENCED 

having possessed many literary families — the Wartons, 
the father and two sons ; the Burneys, more in num- 
ber ; and the nephews of Milton, whose humble toroh 
at least was lighted at the altar of the great bard. 

No event in literary history is more impressive than 
the fate of Qjtintilian; it was in the midst of his 
elaborate work, which was composed to form the literary 
character of a son, that he experienced the most terrible 
affliction in the domestic life of genius — the successive 
deaths of his wife and his only child. It was a moral 
earthquake with a single survivor amidst the ruins. An 
awful burst of parental and literary affliction breaks 
forth in Quintilian's lamentation, — " My wealth, and 
my writings, the fruits of a long and painful life, must 
now be reserved only for strangers ; all I possess is for 
aliens, and no longer mine !" We feel the united agony 
of the husband, the father, and the man of genius ! 

Deprived of these social consolations, we see Johnson 
call about him those whose calamities exiled them from 
society, and his roof lodges the blind, the lame and the 
poor ; for the heart must possess something, it can call 
its own, to be kind to. 

In domestic life, the Abbe De St. Pierre enlarged 
its moral vocabulary, by fixing in his language two 
significant words. One served to explain the virtue 
most familiar to him — hienfaisance ; and that irritable 
vanity which magnifies its ephemeral fame, the sage 
reduced to a mortifying diminutive — la gloriole ! 

It has often excited surprise that men of genius are 
not more reverenced than other men in their domestic 
circle. The disparity between the public and the pri- 
vate esteem of the same man is often striking. In 



IN THEIR DOMESTIC CIRCLE. 251 

privacy we discover that the comic genius is not always 
cheerful, that the sage is sometimes ridiculous, and the 
poet seldom delightful. The golden hour of invention 
must terminate like other hours, and when the man of 
genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, 
and the amusements of life, his companions behold him 
as one of themselves — the creature of habits and in- 
firmities. 

In the business of life the cultivators of science and 
the arts, with all their simplicity of feeling and generous 
openness about them, do not meet on equal terms with 
other men. Their frequent abstractions calling off the 
mind to whatever enters into its lonely pursuits, render 
them greatly inferior to others in practical and imme- 
diate observation. Studious men have been reproached 
as being so deficient in the knowledge of the human 
character, that they are usually disqualified for the 
management of public business. Their confidence in 
their friends has no bound, while they become the 
easy dupes of the designing. A friend, who was in 
office with the late Mr. Cumberland, assures me, that 
he was so intractable to the forms of business, and so 
easily induced to do more or to do less than he ought, 
that he was compelled to perform the official business of 
this literary man, to free himself from his annoyance ; 
and yet, Cumberland could not be reproached with 
any deficiency in a knowledge of the human character, 
which he was always touching with caustic pleasantry. 

Addison and Prior were unskilful statesmen ; and 
Malesherbes confessed, a few days before his death, 
that Turgot and himself, men of genius and philo- 
sophers, from whom the nation had expected much, had 



252 MEN OF GENIUS NEGLECTFUL 

badly administered the affairs of the state ; for " know> 
ing men but by books, and unskilful in business, we 
could not form the king to the government." A man 
of genius may know the whole map of the world oi 
human nature ; but, like the great geographer, may be 
apt to be lost in the wood which any one in the neigh- 
bourhood knows better than him. 

" The conversation of a poet," says Goldsmith, " is 
that of a man of sense, while his actions are those of a 
fool." Genius, careless of the future, and often absent 
in the present, avoids too deep a commingling in the 
minor cares of life. Hence it becomes a victim to 
common fools and vulgar villains. " I love my family's 
welfare, but I cannot be so foolish as to make myself 
the slave to the minute affairs of a house," said Mon- 
tesquieu. The story told of a man of learning is pro- 
bably true, however ridiculous it may appear. Deeply 
occupied in his library, one, rushing in, informed him 
that the house was on fire ! " Go to my wife — these 
matters belong to her!" pettishly replied the inter- 
rupted student. Bacon sat at one end of his table 
wrapt in many a reverie, while at the other the crea- 
tures about him were trafficking w T ith his honour, and 
ruining his good name : " I am better fitted for this," 
said that great man once, holding out a book, " than 
for the life I have of late led. Nature has not fitted 
me for that ; knowing myself by inward calling to be 
fitter to hold a book than to play a part." 

Buffon, who consumed his mornings in his old tower 
of Montbar, at the end of his garden, with all nature 
opening to him, formed all his ideas of what was passing 
before him from the arts of a pliant capuchin, and the 



OF THOSE AROUND TEEM. 253 

comments of a perruquier on the scandalous chronicle of 
the village. These humble confidants he treated as 
children, but the children were commanding the great 
man ! Young, whose satires give the very anatomy of 
human foibles, was wholly governed by his housekeeper. 
She thought and acted for him, which probably greatly 
assisted the " Night Thoughts," but his curate exposed 
the domestic economy of a man of genius by a satirical 
novel. If I am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical 
portraits in his " Love of Fame," Young has omitted 
one of the most striking — his own I While the poet's 
eye was glancing from " earth to heaven," he totally 
overlooked the lady whom he married, and who soon 
became the object of his contempt ; and not only his 
wife, but his only son, who when he returned home for 
the vacation from Winchester school, was only admitted 
into the presence of his poetical father on the first and 
on the last day ; and whose unhappy life is attributed to 
this unnatural neglect* : — a lamentable domestic cata- 
strophe, which, I fear, has too frequently occurred amidst 
the ardour and occupations of literary glory. Much, 
too much, of the tender domesticity of life is violated 
by literary characters. All that lives under their eye, 
all that should be guided by their hand, the recluse and 
abstracted men of genius must leave to their own 
direction. But let it not be forgotten, that, if such 
neglect others, they also neglect themselves, and are 
deprived of those family enjoyments for which few men 

* These facts are drawn from a manuscript of the late Sir Herbert 
Croft, who regretted that Dr. Johnson would not suffer him to give 
this account during the doctor's lifetime, in his life of Young, but 
which it had always been his intention to have added to it. 



254 MEN OF GENIUS OFTEN 

have warmer sympathies. "While the literary cha- 
racter burns with the ambition of raising a great 
literary name, he is too often forbidden to taste of thi: 
domestic intercourse, or to indulge the versatile curiosity 
of his private amusements — for he is chained to his 
great labour. Robertson felt this while employed on 
his histories, and he at length rejoiced when, after many 
years of devoted toil, he returned to the luxury of reading 
for his own amusement and to the conversation of his 
friends. " Such a sacrifice," observes his philosophical 
biographer, " must be more or less made by all who 
devote themselves to letters, whether with a view to 
emolument or to fame ; nor would it perhaps be easy 
to make it, were it not for the prospect (seldom, alas ! 
realised) of earning by their exertions that learned and 
honourable leisure, which he was so fortunate as to 
attain." 

But men of genius have often been accused of 
imaginary crimes. Their very eminence attracts the 
lie of calumny, which tradition often conveys beyond 
the possibility of refutation. Sometimes they are 
reproached as wanting in affection, when they displease 
their fathers by making an obscure name celebrated. 
The family of Descartes lamented, as a blot in their 
escutcheon, that Descartes, who was born a gentleman, 
should become a philosopher ; and this elevated genius 
was refused the satisfaction of embracing an unforgiving 
parent, while his dwarfish brother, with a mind diminu- 
tive as his person, ridiculed his philosophic relative, and 
turned to advantage his philosophic disposition. The 
daughter of Addison was educated with a perfect con- 
tempt of authors, and blushed to bear a name more 
illustrious than that of all the "War wicks, on her alliance 



ACCUSED OF IMAGINARY CRIMES. 255 

to which noble family she prided herself. The children 
of Milton, far from solacing the age of their blind 
parent, became impatient for his death, embittered his 
last hours with scorn and disaffection, and combined to 
cheat and rob him. Milton haying enriched our na- 
tional poetry by two immortal epics, with patient grief 
blessed the single female who did not entirely abandon 
him, and the obscure fanatic who was pleased with his 
poems because they were religious. What felicities ! 
what laurels ! And now we have recently learnt, that 
the daughter of Madame De Sevigne lived on ill terms 
with her mother, of whose enchanting genius she appears 
to have been insensible ! The unquestionable docu- 
ments are two letters hitherto cautiously secreted. The 
daughter was in the house of her mother, when an 
extraordinary letter was addressed to her from the 
chamber of Madame de Sevigne, after a sleepless night. 
In this she describes, with her peculiar felicity, the ill 
treatment she received from the daughter she idolised ; 
it is a kindling effusion of maternal reproach, and ten- 
derness, and genius*. 

Some have been deemed disagreeable companions, 
because they felt the weariness of dulness, or the im- 
pertinence of intrusion ; described as bad husbands 
when united to women, who without a kindred feeling, 
had the mean art to prey upon their infirmities ; or as 
bad fathers, because their offspring have not always 
reflected the moral beauty of their own page. But the 
magnet loses nothing of its virtue, even when the 
particles about it, incapable themselves of being at- 
tracted, are not acted on by its occult property. 

* Lettres in^dites de Madame de Sevigne, pp. 201 and 203. 



250 POVERTY OF LITERARY MEN 



CHAPTER XVII. 

The poverty of literary men. — Poverty, a relative quality. — Of the 
poverty of literary men in what degree desirable. — Extreme poverty. 
— Task- work. — Of gratuitous works. — A project to provide against 
the worst state of poverty among literary men. 

Poverty is a state not so fatal to genius, as it is usually- 
conceived to be. We shall find that it has been some- 
times voluntarily chosen ; and that to connect too closely 
great fortune with great genius, creates one of those 
powerful but unhappy alliances, where the one party 
must necessarily act contrary to the interests of the 
other. 

Poverty is a relative quality, like cold and heat, 
which are but the increase or the diminution in our own 
sensations. The positive idea must arise from com- 
parison. There is a state of poverty reserved even for 
the wealthy man, the instant that he comes in hateful 
contact with the enormous capitalist. But there is a 
poverty neither vulgar nor terrifying, asking no favours 
and on no terms receiving any ; a poverty which an- 
nihilates its ideal evils, and, becoming even a source of 
pride, will confer independence, that first step to genius. 

Among the continental nations, to accumulate wealth 
in the spirit of a capitalist, does not seem to form the 
prime object of domestic life. The traffic of money is 
with them left to the traffickers, their merchants, and 
their financiers. In our country, the commercial cha- 
racter has so closely interwoven and identified itself 



IN WHAT DEGREE DESIRABLE. 257 

with the national one, and its peculiar views have so 
terminated all our pursuits, that every rank is alike 
influenced by its spirit, and things are valued by a 
market-price, which naturally admit of no such appraise- 
ment. In a country where " The Wealth of Nations" 
has been fixed as the first principle of political exist- 
ence, wealth has raised an aristocracy more noble than 
nobility, more celebrated than genius, more popular 
than patriotism ; but however it may partake at times 
of a generous nature, it hardly looks beyond its own 
narrow pale. It is curious to notice that Montesquieu, 
who was in England, observed, that " If I had been 
born here, nothing could have consoled me in failing to 
accumulate a large fortune : but I do not lament the 
mediocrity of my circumstances in France." The 
sources of our national wealth have greatly multiplied, 
and the evil has consequently increased, since the visit 
of the great philosopher. 

The cares of property, the daily concerns of a family, 
the pressure of such minute disturbers of their studies, 
have induced some great minds to regret the abolition 
of those monastic orders beneath whose undisturbed 
shade were produced the mighty labours of a Mont- 
faucon, a Calmet, a Florez, and the still unfinished 
volumes of the Benedictines. Often has the literary 
character, amidst the busied delights of study, sighed 
I to bid a farewell sweet" to the turbulence of society. 
It was not discontent, nor anv undervaluing; of general 
society, but the pure enthusiasm of the library, which 
once induced the studious Evelyn to sketch a retreat of 
this nature, which he addressed to his friend, the illus- 
trious Boyle. He proposed to form '* A college where 



258 POVERTY OF LITERARY MEN 

persons of the same turn of mind might enjoy the 
pleasure of agreeable society, and at the same time .pass 
their days without care or interruption*." This aban- 
donment of their life to their genius has, indeed, often 
cost them too dear, from the days of Sophocles, who, 
ardent in his old age, neglected his family affairs, and 
was brought before his judges by his relations, as one 
fallen into a second childhood. The aged poet brought 
but one solitary witness in his favour — an unfinished 
tragedy; which having read, the judges rose before 
him, and retorted the charge on his accusers. 

A parallel circumstance occurred to the Abbe Cotin, 
the victim of a rhyme of the satirical Boileau. Stu- 
dious, and without fortune, Cotin had lived contented 
till he incurred the unhappiness of inheriting a large 
estate. Then a world of cares opened on him; hi 
rents were not paid, and his creditors increased. Drag- 
ged from his Hebrew and Greek, poor Cotin resolved 
to make over his entire fortune to one of his heirs, on 
condition of maintenance. His other relations assuming 
that a man who parted with his estate in his lifetime 
must necessarily be deranged, brought the learned Cotin 
into court. Cotin had nothing to say in his own favour, 
but requested his judges would allow him to address 
them from the sermons which he preached. The good 
sense, the sound reasoning, and the erudition of the 

* This romantic literary retreat is one of those delightful reveries 
which the elegant taste of Evelyn abounded with. It may he found 
at full length in the fifth volume of Boyle's Works, not in the second, 
as the Biog. Brit. says, llis lady was to live among the society. " If 
I and my wife take up two apartments, for we are to be decently 
asunder, however I stipulate, and her inclination will greatly suit with 
it, that shall be no impediment to the society, but a considerable advan- 
tage to the economic part," &c. 



IN WHAT DEGREE DESIRABLE. 259 

preacher were such, that the whole bench unanimously 
declared that they themselves might be considered as 
madmen, were they to condemn a man of letters who 
was desirous of escaping from the incumbrance of a 
fortune which had only interrupted his studies. 

There may then be sufficient motives to induce such 
a man to make a state of mediocrity his choice. If he 
lose his happiness, he mutilates his genius. Goldoni, 
with all the simplicity of his feelings and habits, in 
reviewing his life, tells us how he was always relapsing 
into his old propensity of comic writing ; " but the 
thought of this does not disturb me," says he ; " for 
though in any other situation I might have been in 
easier circumstances, I should never have been so 
happy." Bayle is a parent of the modern literary 
character; he pursued the same course, and early in 
life adopted the principle " Neither to fear bad fortune, 
nor have any ardent desires for good." Acquainted 
with the passions only as their historian, and living 
only for literature, he sacrificed to it the two great 
acquisitions of human pursuits, fortune and a family : 
but in what country had Bayle not a family and a 
possession in his fame? Hume and Gibbon had the 
most perfect conception of the literary character, and 
they were aware of this important principle in its 
habits. " My own revenue," said Hume, " will be 
sufficient for a man of letters, who surely needs less 
money both for his entertainment and credit than other 
people." Gibbon observed of himself, " Perhaps the 
golden mediocrity of my fortune has contributed to 
fortify my application." 

The state of poverty then, desirable in the domestic 
s2 



260 EXTREME POVERTY OF GENIUS. 

life of genius, is one in which the cares of property 
never intrude, and the want of wealth is never per- 
ceived. This is not indigence ; that state which, how- 
ever dignified the man of genius himself may be, must 
inevitably degrade ! for the heartless will gibe, and 
even the compassionate turn aside in contempt. This 
literary outcast will soon be forsaken even by himself ! 
his own intellect will be clouded over, and his limbs 
shrink in the palsy of bodily misery and shame. 

Malcsuada Fames, et turpis Egestas 
Terribiles visu formse. 

Not that in this history of men of genius we are 
without illustrious examples of those who have even 
learnt to want, that they might emancipate their genius 
from their necessities ! 

We see Rousseau rushing out of the palace of the 
financier, selling his watch, copying music by the sheet, 
and by the mechanical industry of two hours purchasing 
ten for genius. We may smile at the enthusiasm of 
young Barry, who finding himself too constant a 
haunter of taverns, imagined that this expenditure of 
time was occasioned by having money ; and to put an 
end to the conflict, he threw the little he possessed at 
once into the LifYey ; but let us not forget that Barry, 
in the maturity of life, confidently began a labour of 
years, and one of the noblest inventions in his art, a 
great poem in a picture, with no other resource than 
what he found by secret labours through the night, in 
furnishing the shops with those slight and saleable 
sketches which secured uninterrupted mornings for his 
genius. Spinosa, a name as celebrated and perhaps as 
calumniated as Epicurus, lived in all sorts of abstinence, 



EXTREME POVERTY OF GENIUS. 26 1 

even of honours, of pensions, and of presents; which, 
however disguised by kindness, he would not accept, so 
fearful was this philosopher of a chain ! Lodging in a 
cottage, and obtaining a livelihood by polishing optical 
glasses, he declared he had never spent more than he 
earned, and certainly thought there was such a thing 
as superfluous earnings. At his death his small ac- 
counts showed how he had subsisted on a few pence a 
day, and 

"Enjov'd, spare feast! a radish and an egg." 

Poussin persisted in refusing a higher price than that 
affixed to the back of his pictures, at the time he was 
living without a domestic. The great oriental scholar, 
Axquetil de Perron, is a recent example of the lite- 
rary character carrying his indifference to privations to 
the very cynicism of poverty ; and he seems to exult 
over his destitution with the same pride as others would 
expatiate over their possessions. Yet, we must not 
forget, to use the words of Lord Bacon, that "judging 
that means were to be spent upon learning, and not 
learning to be applied to means," De Perron refused 
the offer of thirty thousand livres for his copy of the 
Zend-avesta. Writing to some Bramins, he describes 
his life at Paris to be much like their own. " I subsist 
on the produce of my literary labours without revenue, 
establishment, or place. I have no wife nor children ; 
alone, absolutely free, but always the friend of men of 
probity. In a perpetual war with my senses, I triumph 
over the attractions of the world or I contemn them." 

This ascetic existence is not singular. Parini, a 
great modern poet of Italy, whom the Milanese point 
out to strangers as the glory of their city, lived in the 



262 EXTREME POVERTY OF GENIUS. 

same state of unrepining poverty. Mr. Hobhouse has 
given us this self-portrait of the poet : 

" Me, non nato a perootere 
Le dure illustri porte, 
Nudo accorrk, ma libero 
11 regno della morte." 

Naked, but free ! A life of hard deprivations was 
long that of the illustrious Linnaeus. Without fortune, 
to that great mind it never seemed necessary to acquire 
any. Peregrinating on foot with a stylus, a magnify- 
ing-glass, and a basket for plants, he shared the rustic 
meal of the peasant. Never was glory obtained at a 
cheaper rate ! exclaims one of his eulogists. Satisfied 
with the least of the little, he only felt one perpetual 
want — that of completing his Floras. Not that Lin- 
naeus was insensible to his situation, for he gave his 
name to a little flower in Lapland — the Linncea Borealis, 
from the fanciful analogy he discovered between its 
character and his own early fate, " a little northern 
plant flowering early, depressed, abject, and long over- 
looked." The want of fortune, however, did not de- 
prive this man of genius of his true glory, nor of that 
statue raised to him in the gardens of the University 
of Upsal, nor of that solemn eulogy delivered by a 
crowned head, nor of those medals which his nation 
struck to commemorate the genius of the three king- 
doms of nature ! 

This, then, is the race who have often smiled at the 
light regard of their good neighbours when contrasted 
with their own celebrity ; for in poverty and in soli- 
tude, such men are not separated from their fame ; that 
is ever proceeding, ever raising a secret, but constant, 
triumph in their minds. 



OF LITERARY TASK-WORK. 263 

Yes! Genius undegraded and unexhausted, may, 
indeed, even in a garret glow in its career ; but it must 
be on the principle which induced Rousseau solemnly 
to renounce writing " par metier." This in the Journal 
des Sqavans he once attempted, but found himself quite 
inadequate to " the profession.* " In a garret, the 
author of the " Studies of Nature," as he exultingly 
tells us, arranged his work. " It was in a little garret, 
in the new street of St. Etienne du Mont, where I 
resided four years, in the midst of physical and domestic 
afflictions. But there I enjoyed the most exquisite 
pleasures of my life, amid profound solitude and an 
enchanting horizon. There I put the finishing hand to 
my ' Studies of Nature,' and there I published them." 
Pope, one day taking his usual walk with Harte in the 
Haymarket, desired him to enter a little shop, where 
going up three pair of stairs into a small room, Pope 
said, " In this garret, Addison wrote his • Campaign! ' " 
To the feelings of the poet, this garret had become a 
consecrated spot ; Genius seemed more itself, placed in 
contrast with its miserable locality ! 

The man of genius wrestling with oppressive fortune, 
who follows the avocations of an author as a precarious 
source of existence, should take as the model of the 
authorial life, that of Dr. Johnson. The dignity of the 
literary character was as deeply associated with his 
feelings, and the " reverence thyself" as present to his 
mind, when doomed to be one of the Helots of litera- 
ture, by Osborn, Cave, and Miller, as when, in the 
honest triumph of Genius, he repelled a tardy adulation 

* Twice he repeated this resolution. See his works, vol. xxxi. p. 
283 ; vol. xxxii. p. 90. 



264 OF LITERARY TASK-WORK. 






of the lordly Chesterfield. Destitute of this ennobling 
principle, the author sinks into the tribe of those rabid 
adventurers of the pen, who have masked the degraded 
form of the literary character under the assumed title 
of " authors by profession " * — the Guthries, the 
Ralphs, and the Amhursts. " There are worse evils, 
for the literary man," says a living author, who himself 
is the true model of the great literary character, " than 
neglect, poverty, imprisonment, and death. There are 
even more pitiable objects than Chatterton himself with 
the poison at his lips." — " I should die with hunger, 
were I at peace with the world ! " exclaimed a corsair 
of literature, — and dashed his pen into the black flood 
before him of soot and gall. 

In substituting fortune for the object of his designs, 
the man of genius deprives himself of those heats of 
inspiration reserved for him who lives for himself; the 
tnollia tempora fandi of Art. If he be subservient to 
the public taste, without daring to raise it to his own, 
the creature of his times has not the choice of his sub- 
jects, which choice is itself a sort of invention. A task- 
worker ceases to think his own thoughts. The stipu- 
lated price and time /ire weighing on his pen or his 
pencil, while the hour-glass is dropping its hasty sands. 
If the man of genius would be wealthy and even luxu- 
rious, another fever besides the thirst of glory torments 
him. Such insatiable desires create many fears, and a 



* From an original letter which I have published from Guthrie to 
a minister of state, this modern phrase appears to have been his own 
invention. The principle unblushingly avowed, required the sanction 
of a respectable designation. I have preserved it in " Calamities of 
Authors." 



OF LITERARY TASK-WORK. 265 

mind in fear is a mind in slavery. In one of Shake- 
speare's sonnets he pathetically laments this compul- 
sion of his necessities which forced him to the trade of 
pleasing the public ; and he illustrates this degradation 
by a novel image. " Chide Fortune," cries the bard, — 

14 The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, 
That did not better for my life provide 
Than public means which public manners breeds ; 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 
To ichat it works in, like the dyer's hand." 

Such is the fate of that author, who, in his variety of 
task-works, blue, yellow, and red, lives without ever 
having shown his own natural complexion. We hear 
the eloquent truth from one who has alike shared in 
the bliss of composition, and the misery of its " daily 
bread." " A single hour of composition won from the 
business of the day, is worth more than the whole day's 
toil of him who works at the trade of literature : in the 
one case, the spirit comes joyfully to refresh itself, like 
a hart to the water-brooks ; in the other, it pursues its 
miserable way, panting and jaded with the dogs of 
hunger and necessity behind *." We trace the fate of 
all task-work in the history of Poussin, when called on 
to reside at the French court. Labouring without in- 
termission, sometimes on one thing and sometimes on 
another, and hurried on in things which required both 
time and thought, he saw too clearly the fatal tendency 
of such a life, and exclaimed with ill-suppressed bitter- 
ness, " If I stay long in this country, I shall turn dauber 
like the rest here." The great artist abruptly returned 
to Rome to regain the possession of his own thoughts. 

* Quarterly Review, vol. viii. p. 538. 



266 OF GRATUITOUS LITERARY WORKS. 

It has been a question with some, more indeed abroad 
than at home, whether the art of instructing mankind 
by the press would not be less suspicious in its character, 
were it less interested in one of its prevalent motives ? 
Some noble self-denials of this kind are recorded. The 
principle of emolument will produce the industry which 
furnishes works for popular demand ; but it is only the 
principle of honour which can produce the lasting works 
of genius. Boileau seems to censure Racine for having 
accepted money for one of his dramas, while he, who 
was not rich, gave away his polished poems to the 
public. He seems desirous of raising the art of writing 
to a more disinterested profession than any other, re- 
quiring no fees for the professors. Olivet presented 
his elaborate edition of Cicero to the world, requiring 
no other remuneration than its glory. Milton did not 
compose his immortal work for his trivial copyright ; 
and Linnaeus sold his labours for a single ducat. The 
Abbe Mably, the author of many political and moral 
works, lived on little, and would accept only a few 
presentation-copies from the booksellers. But, since 
we have become a nation of book-collectors, and since 
there exists, as Mr. Coleridge describes it, "a reading 
public," — this principle of honour is altered. Wealthy, 
and even noble authors are proud to receive the largest 
tribute to their genius, because this tribute is the cer- 
tain evidence of the number who pay it. The property 
of a book, therefore, represents to the literary candidate 
the collective force of the thousands of voters on whose 
favour his claims can only exist. This change in the 
affairs of the literary republic, in our country, was felt 
by Gibbon, who has fixed on " the patronage of book- 



" PATRONAGE OF BOOKSELLERS." 267 

sellers " as the standard of public opinion : " the mea- 
sure of their liberality," he says, " is the least ambigu- 
ous test of our common success." The philosopher 
accepted it as a substitute for that " friendship or favour 
of princes, of which he could not boast." The same 
opinion was held by Johnson. Yet, looking on the 
present state of English literature, the most profuse, 
perhaps, in Europe, we cannot refrain from thinking, 
that the u patronage of booksellers" is frequently inju- 
rious to the great interests of literature. 

The dealers in enormous speculative purchases are 
only subservient to the spirit of the times. If they are 
the purveyors, they are also the panders of public taste ; 
and their vaunted patronage only extends to popular 
subjects ; while their urgent demands are sure to pro- 
duce hasty manufactures. A precious work on a recon- 
dite subject, which may have consumed the life of its 
author, no bookseller can patronise ; and whenever such 
a work is published, the author has rarely survived the 
long season of the public's neglect. While popular 
works, after some few years of celebrity, have at length 
been discovered not worth the repairs nor the renewal of 
their lease of fame, the neglected work of a nobler design 
rises in value and rarity. The literary work which 
requires the greatest skill and difficulty, and the longest 
labour, is not commercially valued with that hasty, 
spurious novelty, for which the taste of the public is 
craving, from the strength of its disease rather than of 

O 7 o 

its appetite. Rousseau observed, that his musical opera, 
the work of five or six weeks, brought him as much 
money as he had received for his " Emile," which had 
cost him twenty years of meditation, and three years of 



268 LITERATURE INADEQUATELY REWARDED. 

composition. This single fact represents a hundred. 
So fallacious are public opinion, and the patronage of 
booksellers ! 

Such, then, is the inadequate remuneration of a life 
devoted to literature ; and notwithstanding the more 
general interest excited by its productions within the 
last century, it has not essentially altered their situation 
in society ; for who is deceived by the trivial exultation 
of the gay sparkling scribbler who lately assured us that 
authors now dip their pens in silver ink-standishes, and 
have a valet for an amanuensis ? Fashionable writers 
must necessarily get out of fashion ; it is the inevitable 
fate of the material and the manufacturer. An elee- 
mosynary fund can provide no permanent relief for the 
age and sorrows of the unhappy men of science and 
literature ; and an author may even have composed a 
work which shall be read by the next generation as 
well as the present, and still be left in a state even of 
pauperism. These victims perish in silence ! No one 
has attempted to suggest even a palliative for this great 
evil ; and when I asked the greatest genius of our age 
to propose some relief for this general suffering, a sad 
and convulsive nod, a shrug that sympathised with the 
misery of so many brothers, and an avowal that even he 
could not invent one, was all that genius had to alleviate 
the forlorn state of the literary character*. 

The only man of genius who has thrown out a hint 
for improving the situation of the literary man, is Adam 
Smith. In that passage in his " Wealth of Nations" 

* It was the late Sir Walter Scott — if I could assign the date of 
this conversation, it would throw some light on what might he then 
passing in his own mind. 



LITERATURE INADEQUATELY REWARDED. 269 

to which I have already referred, he says, that " Before 
the invention of the art of printing, the only employ- 
ment by which a man of letters could make anything by 
his talents was that of a public or a private teacher, or 
by communicating to other people the various and useful 
knowledge which he had acquired himself; and this 
surely is a more honourable, a more useful, and in 
general even a more profitable employment than that 
other of writing for a bookseller, to which the art of 
printing has given occasion." We see the political 
economist, alike insensible to the dignity of the literary 
character, incapable of taking a just view of its glorious 
avocation. To obviate the personal wants attached to 
the occupations of an author, he would, more effectually 
than skilfully, get rid of authorship itself. This is not to 
restore the limb, but to amputate it. It is not the pre- 
servation of existence, but its annihilation. His friends 
Hume and Robertson must have turned from this page 
humiliated and indignant. They could have supplied 
Adam Smith with a truer conception of the literary cha- 
racter, of its independence, its influence, and its glory. 
I have projected a plan for the alleviation of the state 
of those authors who are not blessed with a patrimony. 
The trade connected with literature is carried on by men 
who are usually not literate, and the generality of the 
publishers of books, unlike all other tradesmen, are 
often the worst judges of their own wares. Were it 
practicable, as I believe it to be, that authors and men 
of letters could themselves be booksellers, the public 
would derive this immediate benefit from the scheme ; 
a deluge of worthless or indifferent books would be 
turned away, and the name of the literary publisher 



270 PROJECT TO PROVIDE AGAINST 

would be a pledge for the value of every new book. 

Every literary man would choose his own favourite 
department, and we should learn from him as well as 

from his books. 

Against this project it may be urged, that literary 
men are ill adapted to attend to the regular details of 
trade, and that the great capitalists in the book-business 
have not been men of literature. But this plan is not 
suggested for accumulating a great fortune, or for the 
purpose of raising up a new class of tradesmen. It is 
not designed to make authors wealthy, for that would 
inevitably extinguish great literary exertion, but only 
to make them independent, as the best means to preserve 
exertion. The details of trade are not even to reach 
him. The poet Gesner, a bookseller, left his librairie 
to the care of his admirable wife. His own works, the 
elegant editions which issued from his press, and the 
value of manuscripts, were the objects of his attention. 
On the Continent many of the dealers in books have 
been literary men. At the memorable expulsion of the 
French protestants on the edict of Nantes, their ex- 
patriated literary men flew to the shores of England, 
and the free provinces of Holland ; and it was in 
Holland that this colony of litterateurs established 
magnificent printing-houses, and furnished Europe with 
editions of the native writers of France, often preferable 
to the originals, and even wrote the best works of that 
time. At that memorable period in our own history, 
when two thousand non-conformists were ejected on St. 
Bartholomew's day from the national establishment, the 
greater part were men of learning, who, deprived of 
their livings, were destitute of any means of existence. 



EXTREME POVERTY AMONG LITERARY MEN. 271 

These scholars were compelled to look to some profitable 
occupation, and for the greater part they fixed on trades 
connected with literature ; some became eminent book- 
sellers and continued to be voluminous writers, without 
finding their studies interrupted by their commercial 
arrangements. The details of trade must be left to 
others ; the hand of a child can turn a vast machine, and 
the object here proposed would be lost, if authors sought 
to become merely booksellers. 

Whenever the public of Europe shall witness such a 
new order of men among their booksellers, they will 
have less to read, but more to remember. Their opinions 
will be less fluctuating, and their knowledge will come 
to them with more maturity. Men of letters will fly to 
the house of the bookseller who in that class of literature 
in which he deals, will himself be not the least eminent 
member. 



272 MATRIMONY NOT SUITED TO GENIUS. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

The matrimonial state of literature. — Matrimony said not to be well 
suiled to the domestic life of genius — Celibacy a concealed cause of 

the early querulousness of men of genius. — Of unhappy unions Not 

absolutely necessary that the wife should be a literary woman. — Of 
the docility and susceptibility of the higher female character. — A 
picture of a literary wife. 

Matrimony has often been considered as a condition 
not well suited to the domestic life of genius, accom- 
panied as it must be by many embarrassments for the 
head and the he^rt. It was an axiom with Fuessli, the 
Swiss artist, that the marriage state is incompatible 
with a high cultivation of the fine arts ; and such appears 
to have been the feeling of most artists. When Michael 
Angelo was asked why he did not marry, he replied, 
" I have espoused my art ; and it occasions me sufficient 
domestic cares, for my works shall be my children. 
What would Bartholomeo Ghiberti have been, had he 
not made the gates of St. John? His children con- 
sumed his fortune, but his gates, worthy to be the gates 
of Paradise, remain." The three Caraccis refused the 
conjugal bond on the same principle, dreading the inter- 
ruptions of domestic life. Their crayons and paper were 
always on their dining-table. Careless of fortune, they 
determined never to hurry over their works in order 
that they might supply the ceaseless demands of a 
family. We discover the same principle operating in 
our own times. When a young painter, who had just 



DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 273 

married, told Sir Joshua that he was preparing to pur- 
sue his studies in Italy, that great painter exclaimed, 
" Married ! then you are ruined as an artist !" 

The same principle has influenced literary men. Sir 
Thomas Bodley had a smart altercation with his first 
librarian, insisting that he should not marry, maintain- 
ing its absurdity in the man who had the perpetual care 
of a public library ; and Woodward left as one of the 
express conditions of his lecturer, that he was not to be 
a married man. They imagined that their private affairs 
would interfere with their public duties. Peiresc, the 
great French collector, refused marriage, convinced that 
the cares of a family were too absorbing for the freedom 
necessary to literary pursuits, and claimed likewise a 
sacrifice of fortune incompatible with his great designs. 
Boyle, who would not suffer his studies to be inter- 
rupted by " household affairs," lived as a boarder with 
his sister, Lady Ranelagh. Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, 
Bayle, and Hobbes, and Hume, and Gibbon, and Adam 
Smith, decided for celibacy. These great authors placed 
their happiness in their celebrity. 

This debate, for the present topic has sometimes 
warmed into one, is in truth ill adapted for controversy. 
The heart is more concerned in its issue than any 
espoused doctrine terminating in partial views. Look 
into the domestic annals of genius — observe the variety 
of positions into which the literary character is thrown 
in the nuptial state. Cynicism will not always obtain 
a sullen triumph, nor prudence always be allowed to 
calculate away some of the richer feelings of our nature. 
It is not an axiom that literary characters must neces- 
sarily institute a new order of celibacy. The sentence 

T 



274 CELIBACY A CONCEALED CAUSE OF THE 

of the apostle pronounces, that " the forbidding to marry 
is a doctrine of devils." Wesley, who published 
" Thoughts on a Single Life," advised some " to remain 
single for the kingdom of heaven's sake ; but the pre- 
cept," he adds, " is not for the many." So indecisive 
have been the opinions of the most curious inquirers 
concerning the matrimonial state, whenever a great 
destination has engaged their consideration. 

One position we may assume, that the studies, and 
even the happiness of the pursuits of men of genius, are 
powerfully influenced by the domestic associate of their 
lives. 

They rarely pass through the age of love without its 
passion. Even their Delias and their Amandas are often 
the shadows of some real object ; for as Shakspeare's 
experience told him, 

" Never durst poet touch a pen to write, 
Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs." 

Their imagination is perpetually colouring those pictures 
of domestic happiness on which they delight to dwell. 
He who is no husband sighs for that tenderness which 
is at once bestowed and received ; and tears will start 
in the eyes of him who, in becoming a child among 
children, yet feels that he is no father ! These depri- 
vations have usually been the concealed cause of the 
querulous melancholy of the literary character. 

Such was the real occasion of Shenstone's unhappi- 
ness. In early life he had been captivated by a young 
lady adapted to be both the muse and the wife of the 
poet, and their mutual sensibility lasted for some years. 
It lasted until she died. It was in parting from her 



QUERULOUSNESS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 275 

that he first sketched his " Pastoral Ballad." Shen- 
stone had the fortitude to refuse marriage. His spirit 
could not endure that she should participate in that life 
of self-privations to which he was doomed ; but his heart 
was not locked up in the ice of celibacy, and his plain- 
tive love-songs and elegies flowed from no fictitious 
source. " It is long since," says he, " I have considered 
myself as undone. The world will not perhaps consider 
me in that light entirely till I have married my maid." 
Thomson met a reciprocal passion in his Amanda, 
while the full tenderness of his heart was ever wasting 
itself like waters in a desert. As we have been made 
little acquainted with this part of the history of the poet 
of the Seasons, I shall give his own description of those 
deep feelings from a manuscript letter written to Mallet. 
" To turn my eyes a softer way, to you know who — 
absence sighs it to me. What is mv heart made of ? a 
soft system of low nerves, too sensible for my quiet — 
capable of being very happy or very unhappy, I am 
afraid the last will prevail. Lay your hand upon a 
kindred heart, and despise me not. I know not what 
it is, but she dwells upon my thought in a mingled 
sentiment, which is the sweetest, the most intimately 
pleasing the soul can receive, and w r hich I would wish 
never to want towards some dear object or another. To 
have always some secret darling idea to which one can 
still have recourse amidst the noise and nonsense of the 
world, and which never fails to touch us in the most 
exquisite manner, is an art of happiness that fortune 
cannot deprive us of. This may be called romantic ; 
but whatever the cause is, the effect is really felt. Pray, 
when you write, tell me when you saw her, and with 
t2 



276 CELIBACY A CONCEALED CAUSE OF THE 

the pure eye of a friend, when you see her again, 
whisper that I am her most humble servant." 

Even Pope was enamoured of a " scornful lady ; " and, 
as Johnson observed, ," polluted his will with female 
resentment." Johnson himself, we are told by one who 
knew him, " had always a metaphysical passion for one 
princess or other, — the rustic Lucy Porter, or the 
haughty Molly Aston, or the sublimated methodistic 
Hill Boothby; and, lastly, the more charming Mrs. 
Thrale." Even in his advanced age, at the height of 
his celebrity, we hear his cries of lonely wretchedness. 
" I want every comfort ; my life is very solitary and 
very cheerless. Let me know that I have yet a friend — 
let us be kind to one another." But the u kindness" of 
distant friends is like the polar sun — too far removed 
to warm us. Those who have eluded the individual 
tenderness of the female, are tortured by an aehing void 
in their feelings. The stoic Akenside, in his " Odes," 
has preserved the history of a life of genius in a series 
of his own feelings. One entitled, " At Study," closes 
with these memorable lines : 

" Me though no peculiar fair 
Touches with a lover's care ; 

Though the pride of my desire 
Asks immortal friendship's name, 
Asks the palm of honest fame 

And the old heroic lyre ; 
Though the day have smoothly gone, 
Or to letter' d leisure known, 

Or in social duty spent ; 
Yet at eve my lonely breast 
Seeks in vain for perfect rest, 

Languishes fur true content.^ 

If ever a man of letters lived in a state of energy and 
excitement which might raise him above the atmosphere 



QUERULOUSNESS OF MEN OF GENIUS. 277 

of social love, it was assuredly the enthusiast, Thomas 
Hollis, who, solely devoted to literature and to re- 
publicanism, was occupied in furnishing Europe and 
America with editions of his favourite authors. He 
would not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the 
labours of his platonic politics. But his extraordinary 
memoirs, while they show an intrepid mind in a robust 
frame, bear witness to the self-tormentor who had trod- 
den down the natural bonds of domestic life. Hence 
the deep "dejection of his spirits;" those incessant 
cries, that he has " no one to advise, assist, or cherish 
those magnanimous pursuits in him." At length he 
retreated into the country, in utter hopelessness. " I go 
not into the country for attentions to agriculture as such, 
nor attentions of interest of any kind, which I have ever 
despised as such ; but as a used man, to pass the re- 
mainder of a life in tolerable sanity and quiet, after 
having given up the flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, 
month, year after year, successive to each other, to 
public service, and being no longer able to sustain, in 
body or mind, the labours that I have chosen to go 
through without falling speedily into the greatest dis- 
orders, and it might be imbecility itself. This is not 
colouring, but the exact plain truth." 

" Poor moralist, and what art thou ? 
A solitary fly ! 

Thy joys no glittering female meets, 
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets." 

Assuredly it would not have been a question whether 
these literary characters should have married, had not 
Montaigne, when a widower, declared that " he would 
not marry a second time, though it were wisdom itself ;" 



278 UNHAPPY UNIONS. 

but the airy Gascon has not disclosed how far Madame 
was concerned in this anathema. 

If the literary man unite himself to a woman whose 
taste and whose temper are adverse to his pursuits, he 
must courageously prepare for a martyrdom. Should a 
female mathematician be united to a poet, it is probable 
that she would be left amidst her abstractions, to demon- 
strate to herself how many a specious diagram fails when 
brought into its mechanical operation ; or discovering 
the infinite varieties of a curve, she might take occasion 
to deduce her husband's versatility. If she become as 
jealous of his books as other wives might be of his 
mistresses, she may act the virago even over his inno- 
cent papers. The wife of Bishop Cooper, while her 
husband was employed on his Lexicon, one day con- 
signed the volume of many years to the flames, and ob- 
liged that scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a 
second Lexicon. The wife of Whitelocke often de- 
stroyed his MSS., and the marks of her nails have come 
down to posterity in the numerous lacerations still 
gaping in his " Memorials." The learned Sir Henry 
Saville, who devoted more than half his life, and nearly 
ten thousand pounds, to his magnificent edition of St. 
Chrysostom, led a very uneasy life between the saint 
and her ladyship. What with her tenderness for him, 
and her own want of amusement, Saint Chrysostom, it 
appears, incurred more than one danger. 

Genius has not preserved itself from the errors and 
infirmities of matrimonial connexions. The energetic 
character of Dante could neither soften nor control the 
asperity of his lady; and when that great poet lived 
in exile, she never cared to see him more, though he was 



UNHAPPY UNIONS. # 279 

the father of her six children. The internal state of the 
house of Domenichino afflicted that great artist with 
many sorrows. He had married a beauty of high birth, 
and extreme haughtiness, and of the most avaricious dis- 
position. When at Naples, he himself dreaded lest the 
avaricious passion of his wife should not be able to resist 
the offers she received to poison him, and he was com- 
pelled to provide and dress his own food. It is believed 
that he died of poison. What a picture has Passeri left 
of the domestic interior of this great artist ! Cosi fra 
mille crepacuori mori uno de piu eccellenti artejici del 
mundo ; cite oltre at suo valore pittorico avrebbe piu d'ogni 
altri maritato di viver sempre per I'onesta personale. 
" So perished, amidst a thousand heart-breakings, the 
most excellent of artists ; who besides his worth as a 
painter, deserved as much as any one to have lived for 
his excellence as a man." 

Milton carried nothing of the greatness of his mind 
in the choice of his wives. His first wife was the 
object of sudden fancy. He left the metropolis, and 
unexpectedly returned a married man, and united to a 
woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp 
was frightened at the literary habits of the great poet, 
found his house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away 
after a single month's residence ! To this circumstance 
we owe his famous treatise on Divorce ; and a party 
(by no means extinct), who having made as ill choices 
in their wives, were for divorcing, as fast as they had 
been for marrying, calling themselves Miltonists. 

When we find that Moliere, so skilful in human 
life, married a girl from his own troop, who made him 
experience all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous em- 



280 UNHAPPY UNIONS. 

barrassments which he himself played off at the theatre ; 
that Addison's fine taste in morals and in life could 
suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself 
to seek a countess, whom he describes under the stormy 
character of Oceana, and who drove him contemptuously 
into solitude, and shortened his days ; and that Steele, 
warm and thoughtless, was united to a cold precise 
" Miss Prue," as he himself calls her, and from whom he 
never parted without bickerings ; in all these cases we 
censure the great men, not their wives*. Rousseau 
has honestly confessed his error. He had united him- 
self to a low illiterate woman ; and when he retreated 
into solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with 
him. He laments that he had not educated his wife : 
" In a docile age, I could have adorned her mind with 
talents and knowledge, which would have more closely 
united us in retirement. We should not then have feli 
the intolerable tedium of a tete-a-tete ; it is in solitude 
one feels the advantage of living with another who can 
think." Thus Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and 
indicates the right principle. 

Yet it seems not absolutely necessary for the domestic 
happiness of the literary character, that his wife should 
be a literary woman. Tycho Brahe, noble by birth 
as well as genius, married the daughter of a peasant. 
By which means that great man obtained two points 
essential for his abstract pursuits; he acquired an 
obedient wife, and freed himself of his noble relatives, 
who would no longer hold an intercourse with the man 
who was spreading their family honours into more ages 

* See " Curiosities of Literature," for anecdotes of "Literary 
Wives." 



UNHAPPY UNIONS. 281 

than perhaps they could have traced them backwards. 
The lady of Wieland was a pleasing domestic person, 
who, without reading her husband's works, knew he 
was a great poet. Wieland was apt to exercise his 
imagination in declamatory invectives and bitter ampli- 
fications ; and the writer of this account, in perfect 
German taste, assures us, " that many of his felicities 
of diction were thus struck out at a heat." During this 
frequent operation of his genius, the placable temper of 
Mrs. Wieland overcame the orgasm of the German 
bard, merely by persisting in her admiration and her 
patience. When the burst was over, Wieland himself 
was so charmed by her docility, that he usually closed 
with giving up all his opinions. 

There is another sort of homely happiness, aptly 
described in the plain words of Bishop 1S t ewton. Pie 
found " the study of sacred and classic authors ill agreed 
with butchers' and bakers' bills ;" and when the prospect 
of a bishopric opened on him, " more servants, more 
entertainments, a better table, &c." it became necessary 
to look out for " some clever sensible woman to be his 
wife, who would lay out his money to the best advan- 
tage, and be careful and tender of his health ; a friend 
and companion at all hours, and who would be happier 
in staying at home than be perpetually gadding abroad." 
Such are the wives, not adapted to be the votaries, but 
who may be the faithful companions through life, even 
of a man of genius. 

But in the character of the higher female we may 
discover a constitutional faculty of docility and enthu- 
siasm, which has varied with the genius of different ages. 
It is the opinion of an elegant metaphysician, that the 



282 DOCILITY AND SUSCEPTIBILITY OF 

mind of the female adopts and familiarises itself with 
ideas more easily than that of man, and hence the facility 
with which the sex contract, or lose habits, and accom- 
modate their minds to new situations. Politics, war, 
and learning, are equally objects of attainment to their 
delightful susceptibility. Love has the fancied trans- 
parency of the cameleon. When the art of government 
directed the feelings of a woman, we behold Aspasia, 
eloquent with the genius of Pericles, instructing the 
Archons ; Portia, the wife of the republican Brutus, 
devouring burning coals ; and the wife of Lucan, tran- 
scribing and correcting the Pharsalia, before the bust of 
the poet, which she had placed on her bed, that his very 
figure might never be absent. When universities w^ere 
opened to the sex, they acquired academic glory. The 
wdves of military men have shared in the perils of the 
field ; or, like Anna Comnena and our Mrs. Hutchinson, 
have become even their historians. In the age of love 
and sympathy, the female often receives an indelible 
pliancy from her literary associate. His pursuits become 
the objects of her thoughts, and he observes his own 
tastes reflected in his family; much less through his 
own influence, for his solitary labours often preclude 
him from forming them, than by that image of his own 
genius — the mother of his children ! The subjects, the 
very books which enter into his literary occupation, are 
cherished by her imagination ; a feeling finely opened 
by the lady of the author of Sandford and Merton : 
" My ideas of my husband," she said, " are so much 
associated with his hooks, that to part with them would 
be as it were breaking some of the last ties which still 
connect me with so beloved an object. The being in the 



THE HIGHER FEMALE CHARACTER. 283 

midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and 
which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a 
sort of existence with me. Unintelligible as such fond 
chimeras may appear to many people, I am persuaded 
they are not so to you." 

With what simplicity Meta Mollers, the wife of 
Klopstock, in her German-English, describes to Richard- 
son, the novelist, the manner in which she passes her 
day with her poet ! she tells him, that " she is always 
present at the birth of the young verses, which begin 
by fragments, here and there, of a subject with which 
his soul is just then filled. Persons who live as we do 
have no need of two chambers ; we are always in the 
same : I with my little work, still ! still ! only regard- 
ing sometimes my husband's face, which is so venerable 
at that time with tears of devotion, and all the sublimity 
of the subject — my husband reading me his young 
verses, and suffering my criticisms." 

The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has de- 
scended to us, touched by the domestic pencil of genius, 
in the susceptible Calphurnia, the lady of the younger 
Pliny. " Her affection for me," he says, " has given her 
a turn to books : her passion will increase with our days, 
for it is not my youth or my person, which time gradu- 
ally impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which 
she is enamoured." 

I have been told that Buffon, notwithstanding 
his favourite seclusion of his old tower in his garden, 
acknowledged to a friend, that his lady had a consider- 
able influence over his compositions : " Often," said 
he, " when I cannot please myself, and am impatient at 
the disappointment, Madame de Buffon reanimates my 



: 



284 PICTURE OF A LITERARY WIFE. 

exertion, or withdraws me to repose for a short interval 
I return to my pen refreshed, and aided by her advice 

Gesner declared that whatever were his talents, th 
person who had most contributed to develop them was 
his wife. She is unknown to the public ; but the histor 
of the mind of such a woman is discovered in th 
" Letters of Gesner and his Family." While Gesner 
gave himself up entirely to his favourite arts, drawing, 
painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would often 
reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its 
attempts, and often exciting him to new productions, 
her sure and delicate taste was attentively consulted by 
the poet-painter — but she combined the most practical 
good sense with the most feeling imagination. This 
forms the rareness of the character ; for this same 
woman, who united with her husband in the education 
of their children, to relieve him from the interruptions 
of common business, carried on alone the concerns of hi 
house in la librairie. Her correspondence with her son 
a young artist travelling for his studies, opens what an 
old poet comprehensively terms " a gathered mind.' 
Imagine a woman attending to the domestic economy 
and to the commercial details, yet withdrawing out o 
this business of life into the more elevated pursuits of h 
husband, and at the same time combining with all this 
the cares and counsels which she bestowed on her son 
to form the artist and the man. 

To know this incomparable woman we must hear 
her. "Consider your father's precepts as oracles of 
wisdom ; they arc the result of the experience he has 
collected, not only of life, but of that art which he has 
acquired simply by his own industry." She would not 



lis 



PICTURE OF A LITERARY WIFE. 285 

have her son suffer his strong affection to herself to 
absorb all other sentiments. " Had you remained at 
home, and been habituated under your mother's auspices 
to employments merely domestic, what advantage would 
you have acquired? I own we should have passed 
some delightful winter evenings together; but your 
love for the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as 
much distinguished for their talents as their virtues, 
would have been a constant source of regret at your 
passing your time in a manner so little worthy of you." 

How profound is her observation on the strong but 
confined attachments of a youth of genius ! "I have 
frequently remarked, with some regret, the excessive 
attachment you indulge towards those who see and feel 
as you do yourself, and the total neglect with which 
you seem to treat every one else. I should reproach a 
man with such a fault who was destined to pass his life 
in a small and unvarying circle ; but in an artist, w T ho 
has a great object in view, and whose country is the 
whole world, this disposition seems to me likely to pro- 
duce a great number of inconveniences. Alas ! . my 
son, the life you have hitherto led in your father's house 
has been in fact a pastoral life, and not such a one as 
was necessary for the education of a man whose destiny 
summons him to the world." 

And when her son, after meditating on some of the 
most glorious productions of art, felt himself, as he 
says, " disheartened and cast down at the unattainable 
superiority of the artist, and that it was only by re- 
flecting on the immense labour and continued efforts 
which such master-pieces must have required, that I 
regained my courage and my ardour," she observes, 



286 



PICTURE OF A LITERARY WIFE. 



" This passage, my dear son, is to me as precious as 
gold, and I send it to you again, because I wish you to 
impress it strongly on your mind. The remembrance 
of this may also be a useful preservative from too great 
confidence in your abilities, to which a warm imagina- 
tion may sometimes be liable, or from the despondence 
you might occasionally feel from the contemplation of 
grand originals. Continue, therefore, my dear son, to 
form a sound judgment and a pure taste from your own 
observations : your mind, while yet young and flexible, 
may receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful 
that your abilities do not inspire in you too much con- 
fidence, lest it should happen to you as it has to many 
others, that they have never possessed any greater merit 
than that of having good abilities." 

One more extract, to preserve an incident which may 
touch the heart of genius. This extraordinary woman, 
whose characteristic is that of strong sense combined 
with delicacy of feeling, would check her German sen- 
timentality at the moment she was betraying those 
emotions in which the imagination is so powerfully 
mixed up with the associated feelings. Arriving at 
their cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds — " On entering 
the parlour three small pictures, painted by you, met 
my eyes. I passed some time in contemplating them. 
It is now a year, thought I, since I saw him trace these 
pleasing forms ; he whistled and sang, and I saw them 
grow under his pencil ; now he is far, far from us. — In 
short, I had the weakness to press my lips on one of 
these pictures. You well know, my dear son, that 
am not much addicted to scenes of a sentimental turn 
but to-day, while I considered your works, I could not 






PICTURE OF A LITERARY WIFE. 287 

restrain this little impulse of maternal feelings. Do 
not, however, be apprehensive that the tender affection 
of a mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall 
suffer my mind to be too powerfully impressed with 
the painful sensations to which your absence gives birth. 
My reason convinces me that it is for your welfare that 
you are now in a place where your abilities will have 
opportunities of unfolding, and where you can become 
great in your art." 

Such was the incomparable wife and mother of the 
Gesxers ! Will it now be a question whether matri- 
mony be incompatible with the cultivation of the arts ? 
A wife who reanimates the drooping genius of her hus- 
band, and a mother who is inspired by the ambition of 
beholding; her sons eminent, is she not the real being 
which the ancients personified in their Muse ? 



288 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

Literary friendships — In early life — Different from those of men of 
the world. — They suffer an unrestrained communication of their 
ideas, and bear reprimands and exhortations — Unity of feelings. — 
A sympathy not of manners but of feelings — Admit of dissimilar 
characters. — Their peculiar glory. — Their sorrow. 

Among the virtues which literature inspires, is often 
that of the most romantic friendship. The delirium of 
love, and even its lighter caprices, are incompatible with 
the pursuits of the student ; but to feel friendship like 
a passion is necessary to the mind of genius alternately 
elated and depressed, ever prodigal of feeling and ex- 
cursive in knowledge. 

The qualities which constitute literary friendship, 
compared with those of men of the world, must render 
it a sentiment as rare as love itself, which it resembles 
in that intellectual tenderness in which both so deeply 
participate. 

Born " in the dews of their youth," this friendship 
will not expire on their tomb. In the school or the 
college this immortality begins ; and engaged in similar 
studies, should even one excel the other, he will find in 
him the protector of his fame ; as Addison did in 
Steele, West in Gray, and Gray in Mason. Thus 
Petrarch was the guide of Boccaccio, thus Boccaccio 
became the defender of his master's genius. Perhaps 
friendship is never more intense than in an intercourse 
of minds of ready counsels and inspiring ardours. United 



LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 289 

in the same pursuits, but directed by an unequal expe- 
rience, the imperceptible superiority interests, without 
mortifying. It is a counsel, it is an aid ; in whatever 
form it shows itself, it has nothing of the malice of 
rivalry. 

A beautiful picture of such a friendship among men 
of genius offers itself in the history of Mignard, the 
great French painter, and Du Fresno y, the great critic 
of the art itself. Du Fresnoy, abandoned in utter 
scorn by his stern father, an apothecary, for his entire 
devotion to his seductive art, lived at Rome in voluntary 
poverty, till Mignard, his old fellow-student, arrived, 
when they became known by the name of " the inse- 
parables." The talents of the friends were different, 
but their studies were the same. Their days melted 
away together in drawing from the ancient statues and 
the basso-relievos, in studying in the galleries of paint- 
ings, or among the villas which embellish the environs 
of Rome. One roof sheltered them, and one table sup- 
plied then' sober meal. Light were the slumbers which 
closed each day, each the pleasing image of the former. 
But this remarkable friendship was not a simple senti- 
ment which limited the views of " the Inseparables," 
for with them it was a perpetual source of mutual use- 
fulness. They gave accounts to each other of whatever 
they observed, and carefully noted their own defects. 
Du Fresnoy, so critical in the theory of the art, was un- 
successful in the practical parts. His delight in poetical 
composition had retarded the progress of his pictorial 
powers. Not having been taught the handling of his 
pencil, he worked with difficulty ; but Mignard suc- 
ceeded in giving him a freer command and a more 
u 



290 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 

skilful touch ; while Du Fresnoy, who was the more 
literary man, enriched the invention of Mignard by- 
reading to him an Ode of Anacreon or Horace, a pas- 
sage from the Iliad or Odyssey, or the iEneid, or the 
Jerusalem Delivered, which offered subjects for the 
artist's invention, who would throw out five or six 
different sketches on the same subject ; a habit which 
so highly improved the inventive powers of Mignard, 
that he could compose a fine picture with playful facility. 
Thus they lived together, mutually enlightening each 
other. Mignard supplied Du Fresnoy with all that 
fortune had refused him ; and, when he was no more, 
perpetuated his fame, which he felt was a portion of 
his own celebrity, by publishing his posthumous poem, 
De Arte Graphical; a poem, which Mason has made 
readable by his versification, and Reynolds even inte- 
resting by his invaluable commentary. 

In the poem Cowley composed on the death of his 
friend Harvey, this stanza opens a pleasing scene of 
two young literary friends engaged in their midnight 
studies. 

" Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights ! 
How oft unwearied have we spent the nights, 
Till the Ledaean stars, so famed for love, 
Wonder 1 d at us from above. 
We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine ; 
But search of deep philosophy, 
Wit, eloquence, and poetry ; 
Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine." 

Touched by a personal knowledge of this union of 
genius and affection, even Malone commemorates, with 
unusual warmth, the literary friendships of Sir Joshua 

* La Vie de Pierre Mignard, par L'Abbe de Monville, the work ot 
an amateur. 



LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 291 

Reynolds; and with a felicity of fancy not often 
indulged, has raised an unforced parallel between the 
bland wisdom of Sir Joshua and the " mitis sapientia 
Lasli." " What the illustrious Scipio was to Lselius, 
was the all-knowing and all-accomplished Burke to 
Reynolds;" and what the elegant Lselius was to his 
master Panotitis, whom he gratefully protected, and to 
his companion the poet Lucilius, whom he patronised, 
was Reynolds to Johnson, of whom he was the scholar 
and friend, and to Goldsmith, whom he loved and 
aided. 

Count Azara mourns with equal tenderness and 
force over the memory of the artist and the writer 
Mengs. " The most tender friendships would call forth 
tears in this sad duty of scattering flowers on his tomb ; 
but the shade of my extinct friend warns me not to be 
satisfied with dropping flowers and tears — they are use- 
■ less; and I would rather accomplish his wishes, in 
making known the author and his works." 

I am infinitely delighted by a circumstance commu- 
nicated to me by one who had visited Gleim, the German 
poet, who seems to have been a creature made up alto- 
gether of sensibility. His many and illustrious friends 
he had never forgotten, and to the last hour of a life 
prolonged beyond his eightieth year, he possessed those 
interior feelings which can make even an old man an 
enthusiast. There seemed for Gleim to be no extinction 
in friendship when the friend was no more ; and he had 
invented a singular mode of gratifying his feelings of 
j literary friendships. The visitor found the old man in 
a room of which the wainscot was panelled, as we still 
see among us in ancient houses. In every panel Gleim 
u2 



292 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS DIFFER 

had inserted the portrait of a friend, and the apartment 
was crowded. " You see," said the grey-haired poet, 
" that I never have lost a friend, and am sitting always 
among them." 

Such friendships can never be the lot of men of the 
world ; for the source of these lies in the interior affec- 
tions and the intellectual feelings. Fontenelle de- 
scribes with characteristic delicacy the conversations of 
such literary friends : " Our days passed like moments ; 
thanks to those pleasures, which, however, are not in- 
cluded in those which are commonly called pleasures." 
The friendships of the men of society move on the 
principle of personal interest, but interest can easily 
separate the interested ; or they are cherished to relieve 
themselves from the listlessness of existence, but as 
weariness is contagious, the contact of the propagator 
is watched. Men of the world may look on each other 
with the same countenances, but not with the same 
hearts. In the common mart of life intimacies may be 
found which terminate in complaint and contempt ; the 
more they know one another, the less is their mutual 
esteem : the feeble mind quarrels with one still more 
imbecile than itself ; the dissolute riot with the dissolute, 
and they despise their companions, while they too have 
themselves become despicable. 

Literary friendships are marked by another pecu- 
liarity ; the true philosophical spirit has learnt to bear 
that shock of contrary opinions which minds less medi- 
tative are unequal to encounter. Men of genius live in 
the unrestrained communication of their ideas, and 
confide even their caprices with a freedom which some- 
times startles ordinary observers. We see literary men 



FROM THOSE OF MEN OF THE WORLD. 293 

the most opposite in dispositions and opinions, deriving 
from each other that fulness of knowledge which unfolds 
the certain, the probable, the doubtful. Topics which 
break the world into factions and sects; and truths 
which ordinary men are doomed only to hear from a 
malignant adversary, they gather from a friend ! If 
neither yields up his opinions to the other, they are at 
least certain of silence and a hearing ; but usually 

" The wise, new wisdom from the wise acquire." 

This generous freedom, which spares neither repri- 
mands nor exhortation, has often occurred in the inter- 
course of literary men. Hume and Robertson were 
engaged in the same studies, but with very opposite 
principles ; yet Robertson declined writing the English 
history, which he aspired to do, lest it should injure the 
plans of Hume ; a noble sacrifice ! 

Politics once divided Boccaccio and Petrarch. The 
poet of Yalchiusa had never forgiven the Florentines 
for their persecution of his father. By the mediation 
of Boccaccio they now offered to reinstate Petrarch 
in his patrimony and his honours. Won over by the 
tender solicitude of his friend, Petrarch had consented 
to return to his country ; but with his usual inconstancy 
of temper, he had again excused himself to the senate 
of Florence, and again retreated to his solitude. Nor 
was this all ; for the Visconti of Milan had by their 
flattery and promises seduced Petrarch to their court ; 
a court, the avowed enemy of Florence. Boccaccio, 
for the honour of literature, of his friend, of his country, 
indignantly heard of Petrarch's fatal decision, and 
addressed him by a letter, the most interesting perhaps 
which ever passed between two literary friends, who 



294 LITERARY FRIENDS BEAR MUTUAL 

were torn asunder by the momentary passions of the 
vulgar, but who were still united by that immortal 
friendship which literature inspires, and by a reverence 
for that posterity which they knew would concern itself 
with their affairs. 

It was on a journey to Ravenna that Boccaccio first 
heard the news of Petrarch's abandonment of his 
country, when he thus vehemently addressed his brother- 
genius. 

" I would be silent, but I cannot : my reverence com- 
mands silence, but my indignation speaks. How has it 
happened that Silvanus (under this name he conceals 
Petrarch) has forgotten his dignity, the many conver- 
sations we had together on the state of Italy, his hatred 
of the archbishop (Yisconti), his love of solitude and 
freedom, so necessary for study, and has resolved to 
imprison the Muses at that court? Whom may we 
trust again, if Silvanus, who once branded II Visconti as 
the Cruel, a Polyphemus, a Cyclop, has avowed himself 
his friend, and placed his neck under the yoke of him 
whose audacity, and pride, and tyranny, he so deeply 
abhorred ? How has Yisconti obtained that which King 
Robert, which the pontiff, the emperor, the King of 
France could not? Am I to conclude that you accepted 
this favour from a disdain of your fellow-citizens, who 
once indeed scorned you, but who have reinstated you 
in the paternal patrimony of which you had been 
deprived? I do not disapprove of a just indignation ; 
but I take Heaven to witness, that I believe that no 
man, whoever he may be, rightly and honestly can 
labour against his country, whatever be the injury he 
has received. You will gain nothing by opposing me 



REPRIMANDS AND EXHORTATIONS. 295 

in this opinion ; for if stirred up by the most just indig- 
nation, you become the friend of the enemy of your 
country, unquestionably you will not spur him on to 
war, nor assist him by your arm, nor by your counsel ; 
yet how can you avoid rejoicing with him, when you 
hear of the ruins, the conflagrations, the imprisonments, 
death, and rapine, which he shall spread among us ?" 

Such was the bold appeal to elevated feelings, and 
such the keen reproach inspired by that confidential 
freedom which can only exist in the intercourse of great 
minds. The literary friendship, or rather adoration of 
Boccaccio for Petrarch, was not bartered at the cost 
of his patriotism : and it is worthy of our notice that 
Petrarch, whose personal injuries from an ungenerous 
republic were rankling in his mind, and whom even the 
eloquence of Boccaccio could not disunite from his pro- 
tector Yisconti, yet received the ardent reproaches of 
his friend without anger, though not without maintain- 
ing the freedom of his own opinions. Petrarch replied, 
that the anxiety of Boccaccio for the liberty of his 
friend was a thought most grateful to him ; but he 
assured Boccaccio that he preserved his freedom, even 
although it appeared that he bowed under a, hard yoke. 
He hoped that he had not to learn to serve in his old 
age, he, who had hitherto studied to preserve his inde- 
pendence ; but in respect to servitude, he did not know 
whom it was most displeasing to serve, a tyrant like 
Yisconti, or with Boccaccio, a people of tyrants'*. 

The unity of feeling is displayed in such memorable 
associates as Beaumont and Fletcher ; whose labours 

* These interesting letters are preserved in. Count Baldelli's Life of 
Boccaccio, p. 115. 



296 UNITY OF FEELING. 

are so combined, that no critic can detect the mingled 
production of either; and whose lives are so closely united > 
that no biographer can compose the memoirs of the one 
without running into the history of the other. Their 
days were interwoven as their verses. Montaigne and 
Charron, in the eyes of posterity, are rivals, but such 
literary friendship knows no rivalry. Such was Mon- 
taigne's affection for Charron, that he requested him by 
his will to bear the arms of the Montaignes ; and Char- 
ron evinced his gratitude to the manes of his departed 
friend, by leaving his fortune to the sister of Montaigne. 
How pathetically Erasmus mourns over the death of 
his beloved Sir Thomas More ! — " In Moro mihi videor 
extinctus" — " I seem to see myself extinct in More." 
It was a melancholy presage of his own death, which 
shortly after followed. The Doric sweetness and sim- 
plicity of old Isaac Walton, the angler, were reflected 
in a mind as clear and generous, when Charles Cotton 
continued the feelings, rather than the little work of 
"Walton. Metastasio and Farinelli called each other 
il Gemello, the Twin ; and both delighted to trace the 
resemblance of their lives and fates, and the perpetual 
alliance of the verse and the voice. The famous John 
Baptista Porta had a love of the mysterious parts of 
sciences, such as physiognomy, natural magic, the cryp- 
tical arts of writing, and projected many curious inven- 
tions which astonished his age, and which we have 
carried to perfection. This extraordinary man saw his 
fame somewhat diminished by a rumour that his brother 
John Yincent had a great share in the composition of 
his works ; but this never disturbed him, and Peiresc, 
in an interesting account of a visit to this celebrated 



UNITY OF FEELING. 297 

Neapolitan, observed, that though now aged and grey- 
haired, he treated his younger brother as a son. These 
single-hearted brothers, who would not marry that they 
might never be separated, knew of but one fame, and 
that was the fame of Porta. 

Goguet, the author of " The Origin of the Arts and 
Sciences," bequeathed his MSS. and his books to his 
friend Fugere, with whom he had long united his affec- 
tions and his studies, that his surviving friend might 
proceed with them : but the author had died of a slow 
and painful disorder, which Fugere had watched by his 
side, in silent despair. The sight of those MSS. and 
books was the friend's death-stroke ; half his soul, 
which had once given them animation, was parted from 
him, and a few weeks terminated his own days. When 
Lloyd heard of the death of Churchill, he neither 
wished to survive him, nor did. The Abbe de St. Pierre 
gave an interesting proof of literary friendship for 
Varignon the geometrician. They were of congenial 
dispositions, and St. Pierre, when he went to Paris, 
could not endure to part with Yarignon, who was too 
poor to accompany him ; and St. Pierre was not rich. 
A certain income, however moderate, was necessary for 
the tranquil pursuits of geometry. St. Pierre presented 
Yarignon with a portion of his small income, accom- 
panied by that delicacy of feeling which men of genius 
who know each other can best conceive : " I do not give 
it you," said St. Pierre, " as a salary but as an annuity, 
that you may be independent, and quit me when you 
dislike me." The same circumstance occurred between 
Akenside and Dyson. Dyson, when the poet was in 
great danger of adding one more illustrious name to the 



298 SYMPATHY OF FEELINGS NOT OF MANNERS 

" Calamities of Authors," interposed between him and 
ill-fortune, by allowing him an annuity of three hundred 
a year ; and, when he found the fame of his literary 
friend attacked, although not in the habit of composi- 
tion, he published a defence of his poetical and philoso- 
phical character. The name and character of Dyson 
have been suffered to die away, without a single tribute 
of even biographical sympathy ; as that of Longueville 
the modest patron of Butler, in whom that great 
political satirist found what the careless ingratitude of 
a court had denied : but in the record of literary glory, 
the patron's name should be inscribed by the side of the 
literary character ; for the public incurs an obligation 
whenever a man of genius is protected. 

The statesman Fouquet, deserted by all others, wit- 
nessed La Fontaine hastening every literary man to 
the prison-gate. Many have inscribed their works to 
their disgraced patron, as Pope did so nobly to the Earl 
of Oxford in the Tower ; 

" When interest calls off all her sneaking train, 
And all the obliged desert, and all the vain, 
They wait, or to the scaffold, or the cell, 
When the last ling'ring friend has bid farewell." 

Literary friendship is a sympathy not of manners, 
but of feelings. The personal character may happen to 
be very opposite : the vivacious may be loved by the 
melancholic, and the wit by the man of learning. He 
who is vehement and vigorous, will feel himself a double 
man by the side of the friend who is calm and subtle. 
When we observe such friendships, we are apt to 
imagine that they are not real because the characters 
are dissimilar ; but it is their common tastes and pursuits 
which form a bond of union. Pomponius L^etus, so 



AMONG LITERARY MEN. 2Q9 

called from his natural good-humour, was the close 
friend of Hermolaus Barbarus, whose saturnine and 
melancholy dispositions he often exhilarated ; the warm, 
impetuous Luther was the beloved friend of the mild 
and amiable Melancthon ; the caustic Boileau was 
the companion of Racine and Moliere ; and France, 
perhaps, owes the chefs-d'oeuvres of her tragic and her 
comic poet to her satirist. The delicate taste, and the 
refining ingenuity of Hurd, only attached him the more 
to the impetuous and dogmatic "Warburton. No men 
could be more opposite in personal character than the 
careless, gay, and hasty Steele, and the cautious, 
serious, and elegant Addison ; yet no literary friend- 
ship was more fortunate than their union. 

One glory is reserved for literary friendship. The 
friendship of a great name, indicates the greatness of 
the character who appeals to it. When Sydenham 
mentioned, as a proof of the excellence of his method of 
treating acute diseases, that it had received the appro- 
bation of his illustrious friend Locke, the philosophers 
opinion contributed to the physician's success. 

Such have been the friendships of great literary 
characters ; but too true it is, that they have not always 
contributed thus largely to their mutual happiness 
The querulous lament of Gleim to Klopstock is too 
generally participated. As Gleim lay on his death- 
bed, he addressed the great bard of Germany — " I am 
dying, dear Klopstock ; and as a dying man will I say, 
in this world we have not lived long enough together 
and for each other ; but in vain would we now recall 
the past ! M What tenderness in the reproach ! What 
self-accusation in its modesty ! 



300 LITERARY AND PERSONAL CHARACTER. 



CHAPTER XX. 

The literary and the personal character. — The personal dispositions of 
an author may be the reverse of those which appear in his writings. 
— Erroneous conceptions of the character of distant authors. — Para- 
doxical appearances in the history of Genius. — Why the character of 
the man may be opposite to that of his writings. 

Are the personal dispositions of an author discover- 
able in his writings as those of an artist are imagined 
to appear in his works, where Michael Angelo is always 
great, and Raphael ever graceful ? 

Is the moralist a moral man ? Is he malignant who 
publishes caustic satires ? Is he a libertine who com- 
poses loose poems ? And is he whose imagination 
delights in terror and in blood, the very monster he 
paints ? 

Many licentious writers have led chaste lives. La 
Mothe le Vayer wrote two works of a free nature ; 
yet his was the unblemished life of a retired sage. 
Bayle is the too faithful compiler of impurities, but he 
resisted the voluptuousness of the senses as much as 
Newton. La Fontaine wrote tales fertile in intrigues, 
yet the " bon homme " has not left on record a single 
ingenious amour of his own. The Queen of Navarre's 
Tales are gross imitations of Boccaccio's ; but she herself 
was a princess of irreproachable habits, and had given 
proof of the most rigid virtue ; but stories of intrigues, 
told in a natural style, formed the fashionable literature 
of the day, and the genius of the female writer was 
amused in becoming an historian without being an actor. 



LITERARY AND PERSONAL CHARACTER. 301 

^ortiguerra, the author of the Ricciardetto, abounds 
Ith loose and licentious descriptions, and yet neither 
is manners nor his personal character were stained by- 
te offending freedom of his inventions. Smollet's 
laracter is immaculate; yet he has described two 
jenes which offend even in the license of imagination. 
Rowley, who boasts with such gaiety of the versatility 
his passion among so many mistresses, wanted even 
the confidence to address one. Thus, licentious writers 
lay be very chaste persons. The imagination may be 
volcano, while the heart is an Alp of ice. 
Turn to the moralist — there we find Seneca, an 
usurer of seven millions, writing on moderate desires on 
a table of gold. Sallust, who so eloquently declaims 
against the licentiousness of the age, was repeatedly 
accused in the senate of public and habitual debaucheries; 
and when this inveigh er against the spoilers of provinces 
attained to a remote government, he pillaged like Verres. 
That " Demosthenes was more capable of recommend- 
ing than of imitating the virtues of our ancestors," is the 
observation of Plutarch. Lucian, when young, de- 
claimed against the friendship of the great, as another 
name for servitude ; but when his talents procured him 
a situation under the emperor, he facetiously compared 
himself to those quacks, who themselves plagued by a 
perpetual cough, offer to sell an infallible remedy for one. 
Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, declares that no man 
ought to be punished for his religion ; yet he became a 
fierce persecutor, flogging and racking men for his own 
" true faith." At the moment the poet Rousseau was 
giving versions of the Psalms, full of unction, as our 
Catholic neighbours express it, he was profaning the 



302 PERSONAL CHARACTER OP AN AUTHOR 

same pen with infamous epigrams ; and an erotic poet 
of our times has composed night-hymns in churchyards 
with the same ardour with which he poured forth 
Anacreontics. Napoleon said of Bernardin St. Pierre, 
whose writings breathe the warm principles of humanity 
and social happiness in every page, that he was one of 
the worst private characters in France. I have heard 
this from other quarters ; it startles one ! The pathetic 
genius of Sterne played about his head, but never 
reached his heart. Cardinal Richelieu wrote "The 
Perfection of a Christian, or the Life of a Christian ;" 
yet was he an utter stranger to Gospel maxims ; and 
Frederick the Great, when young, published his 
Anti-Machiavel, and deceived the world by the promise 
of a pacific reign. This military genius protested against 
those political arts which he afterwards adroitly prac- 
tised, uniting the lion's head with the fox's tail — and thus 
himself realising the political monster of Machiavel ! 

And thus also is it with the personal dispositions of 
an author, which may be quite the reverse from those 
which appear in his writings. Johnson would not 
believe that Horace was a happy man because his 
verses were cheerful, any more than he could think 
Pope so, because the poet is continually informing us of 
it. It surprised Spence, when Pope told him that Rowe 
the tragic poet, whom he had considered so solemn a 
personage, " would laugh all day long, and do nothing 
else but laugh." Lord Kaimes says, that Arbuthnot 
must have been a great genius, for he exceeded Swift 
and Addison in humorous painting ; although we are 
informed, he had nothing of that peculiarity in his 
character. Young, who is constantly contemning pre- 



MAY BE THE REVERSE OF HIS WRITINGS. 303 

ferment in his writings, was all his life pining after it ; 
and the conversation of the sombrous author of the 
" Night Thoughts " was of the most volatile kind, 
abounding with trivial puns. He was one of the first 
who subscribed to the assembly at Wellwyn. Mrs. Carter, 
who greatly admired his sublime poetry, expressing her 
surprise at his social converse, he replied, — " Madam, 
there is much difference between writing and talking." 

Moliere, on the contrary, whose humour is so per- 
fectly comic, and even ludicrous, was thoughtful and 
serious, and even melancholy. His strongly-featured 
physiognomy exhibits the face of a great tragic, rather 
than of a great comic poet. Boileau called Moliere 
" The contemplative man." Those who make the 
world laugh, often themselves laugh the least. A 
famous and witty harlequin of France was overcome 
with hypochondriasm, and consulted a physician, who, 
after inquiring about his malady, told his miserable 
patient, that he knew of no other medicine for him than 
to take frequent doses of Carlin — " I am Carlin him- 
self," exclaimed the melancholy man in despair. Bur- 
ton, the pleasant and vivacious author of "The Anatomy 
of Melancholy," of whom it is noticed, that he could in 
an interval of vapours raise laughter in any company, 
in his chamber was " mute and mopish," and was at 
last so overcome by that intellectual disorder, which he 
appeared to have got rid of by writing his volume, that 
it is believed he closed his life in a fit of melancholy. 

Could one have imagined that the brilliant wit, the 
luxuriant raillery, and the fine and deep sense of Pascal, 
could have combined with the most opposite qualities — 
the hypochondriasm and bigotry of an ascetic ? Roche- 



304 PERSONAL CHARACTER OF AN AUTHOR 

foucauld, in private life, was a conspicuous exarapl 
of all those moral qualities of which he seemed to deny 
the existence, and exhibited in this respect a striking 
contrast to the Cardinal De Retz, who has presumed to 
censure him for his want of faith in the reality of virtue , 
but De Retz himself was the unbeliever in disinte- 
rested virtue. This great genius was one of those 
pretended patriots destitute of a single one of the 
virtues for which he was the clamorous advocate o: 
faction. 

When Yalincour attributed the excessive tenderness 
in the tragedies of Racine to the poet's own impassioned 
character, the son amply showed that his father was by 
no means this slave of love. Racine never wrote 
single love poem, nor even had a mistress ; and his 
wife had never read his tragedies, for poetry was not 
her delight. Racine's motive for making love the 
constant source of action in his tragedies, was, from the 
principle which has influenced so many poets, who 
usually conform to the prevalent taste of the times. In 
the court of a young monarch, it was necessary that 
heroes should be lovers ; Corneille had nobly run in one 
career, and Racine could not have existed as a great poet, 
had he not rivalled him in an opposite one. The tender 
Racine was no lover; but he was a subtle and epigram- 
matic observer, before whom his convivial friends never 
cared to open their minds ; and the caustic Boileau 
truly said of him, " Racine is far more malicious than 

In 
am. 

Alfieri speaks of his mistress, as if he lived with 

her in the most unreserved familiarity; the reverse was 

the case. And the gratitude and affection with which 



MAY BE THE REVERSE OF HIS WRITINGS. 305 

he describes his mother, and which she deserved, entered 
so little into his habitual feelings, that after their early- 
separation, he never saw her but once, though he often 
passed through the country where she resided. 

Johnson has composed a beautiful Rambler, describ- 
ing the pleasures which result from the influence of good 
humour ; and somewhat remarkably says, " Without 
good humour, learning and bravery can be only formi- 
dable, and confer that superiority which swells the 
heart of the lion in the desert, where he roars without 
reply and ravages without resistance." He who could 
so finely discover the happy influence of this pleasing 
quality was himself a stranger to it, and " the roar and 
the ravage " were familiar to our lion. Men of genius 
frequently substitute their beautiful imagination for 
spontaneous and natural sentiment. It is not therefore 
surprising if we are often erroneous in the conception 
we form of the personal character of a distant author. 
Klopstock, the votary of the muse of Zion, so asto- 
nished and warmed the sage Bodmer, that he invited 
the inspired bard to his house ; but his visitor shocked 
the grave professor, when, instead of a poet rapt in 
silent meditation, a volatile youth leapt out of the 
chaise, who was an enthusiast for retirement only when 
writing verses. An artist whose pictures exhibit a 
series of scenes of domestic tenderness, awakening all 
! the charities of private life, I have heard participated 
in them in no other way than on his canvas. Evelyn, 
who has written in favour of active life, loved, and lived 

in, retirement*;" while Sir George Mackenzie, who 

, 

* Since this -was written, the correspondence of Evelyn has appeared, 
by which we find that he apologised to Cowley for having published 

X 



306 ERRONEOUS CONCEPTIONS OP THE 

had been continually in the bustle of business, framed 
an eulogium on solitude. We see in Machiavei/s code 
of tyranny, of depravity, and of criminal violence, a 
horrid picture of human nature ; but this retired phi- 
losopher was a friend to the freedom of his country, he 
participated in none of the crimes he had recorded, but 
drew up these systematised crimes "as an observer, 
not as a criminal." Drummond, whose sonnets still 
retain the beauty and the sweetness and the delicacy of 
the most amiable imagination, was a man of a harsh 
irritable temper, and has been thus characterised : 

" Testie Drummond could not speak for fretting." 

Thus authors and artists may yield no certain indi- 
cation of their personal characters in their works. In- 
constant men will write on constancy, and licentious 
minds may elevate themselves into poetry and piety 
We should be unjust to some of the greatest geniuses, 
if the extraordinary sentiments which they put into the 
mouths of their dramatic personages are maliciously to 
be applied to themselves. Euripides was accused of 
atheism when he introduced a denier of the gods on tin 
stage. Milton has been censured by Clarke for th 
impiety of Satan; and an enemy of Shakespeare 
might have reproached him for his perfect delineation 
of the accomplished villain Iago, as it was said that 
Dr. Moore was hurt in the opinions of some by his 

this very treatise, which seemed to condemn that life of study and 
privacy to which they were both equally attached ; and confesses that 
the whole must be considered as a mere sportive effusion, request™ 
that Cowley would not suppose its principles formed his private opinions. 
Thus Leibnitz, we arc told, laughed at the fanciful system revealed in 
his T/teodicee, and acknowledged, that he never wrote it in earnest; 
that a philosopher is not always obliged to write seriously, and that to 
invent an hypothesis is only a proof of the force of imagination. 



CHARACTER OF DISTANT AUTHORS. 307 

odious Zeluco. Crebillon complains of this — " They 
charge me with all the iniquities of Atreus, and they 
consider me in some places as a wretch with whom it is 
unfit to associate ; as if all which the mind invents 
must be derived from the heart." This poet offers a 
striking instance of the little alliance existing between 
the literary and personal dispositions of an author. 
Crebillox, who exulted on his entrance into the French 
Academy that he had never tinged his pen with the gall 
of satire, deliohted to strike on the most harrowing 
string of the tragic lyre. In his Atreus, the father 
drinks the blood of his son ; in his Rhadamistus, the son 
expires under the hand of the father : in his Electra, 
the son assassinates the mother. A poet is a painter of 
the soul, but a great artist is not therefore a bad man. 

Montaigne appears to have been sensible of this fact 
in the literary character. Of authors, he says, he likes 
to read their little anecdotes and private passions : — 
" Car j'ai une singuliere curiosite de connaitre Tame et 
les na'ifs jugemens de mes auteurs. II faut bien juger 
leur sumsance, mais non pas leurs mceurs, ni eux, par 
cette montre de leurs ecrits qu ils etalent au theatre du 
monde." "Which may be thus translated : " For I have 
a singular curiosity to know the soul and simple opinions 
of my authors. "We must judge of their ability, but 
not of their manners, nor of themselves, by that show 
of their writings which they display on the theatre of 
the world." This is very just; are we yet sure, 
however, that the simplicity of this old favourite of 
Europe might not have been as much a theatrical 
gesture, as the sentimentality of Sterne ? The great 
authors of the Port-Royal Logic have raised severe 
x 2 



308 ERRONEOUS CONCEPTIONS OF THE 

objections to prove that Mointaigne was not quite so 
open in respect to those simple details which he imagined 
might diminish his personal importance with his readers 
He pretends that he reveals all his infirmities and 
weaknesses, while he is perpetually passing himself off 
for something more than he is. He carefully informs 
us that he has " a page," the usual attendant of an in 
dependent gentleman, and lives in an old family chateau; 
when the fact was, that his whole revenue did not 
exceed six thousand livres, a state beneath mediocrity. 
He is also equally careful not to drop any mention of 
his having a clerk with a hag ; for he was a counsellor 
of Bordeaux, but affected the gentleman and the soldier 
He trumpets himself forth for having been mayor of 
Bordeaux, as this offered an opportunity of telling us 
that he succeeded Marshal Biron, and resigned it to 
Marshal Matignon. Could he have discovered that any 
marshal had been a lawyer, he would not have sunk 
that part of his life. Montaigne himself has said, 
" that in forming a judgment of a man's life, particular 
regard should be paid to his behaviour at the end of it ; " 
and he more than once tells us that the chief study of 
his life is to die calm and silent; and that he will 
plunge himself headlong and stupidly into death, as 
into an obscure abyss, which swallows one up in an 
instant ; that to die was the affair of a moment's suf- 
fering, and required no precepts. He talked of reposing 
on the " pillow of doubt." But how did this great 
philosopher die ? He called for the more powerful 
opiates of the infallible church ! The mass was per- 
formed in his chamber, and in rising to embrace it his 
hands dropped and failed him; thus, as Professor 



CHARACTER OF DISTANT AUTHORS. 309 

Dugald Stewart observes on this philosopher, — " He 
expired in performing what his old preceptor, Buchanan, 
would not have scrupled to describe as an act of 
idolatry." 

We must not then consider that he who paints vice 
with energy is therefore vicious, lest we injure an 
honourable man; nor must we imagine that he who 
celebrates virtue is therefore virtuous, for we may then 
repose on a heart which knowing the right pursues the 
wrong. 

These paradoxical appearances in the history of 
genius present a curious moral phenomenon. Much 
must be attributed to the plastic nature of the versatile 
faculty itself. Unquestionably many men of genius 
have often resisted the indulgence of one talent to 
exercise another with equal power ; and some who have 
solely composed sermons, could have touched on the 
foibles of society with the spirit of Horace or Juvenal. 
Blackstone and Sir William Jones directed that 
genius to the austere studies of law and philology, 
which might have excelled in the poetical and historical 
character. So versatile is this faculty of genius, that 
its possessors are sometimes uncertain of the manner in 
which they shall treat their subject, whether gravely 
or ludicrously. When Breboeuf, the French translator 
of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had completed the first 
book as it now appears, he at the same time composed 
a burlesque version, and sent both to the great arbiter 
of taste in that day, to decide which the poet should 
continue. The decision proved to be difficult. Are 
I there not writers who, with all the vehemence of genius, 
| by adopting one principle, can make all things shrink 



310 PARADOXICAL APPEARANCES IN 

into the pigmy forms of ridicule, or by adopting another 
principle startle us by the gigantic monsters of their 
own exaggerated imagination? On this principle of 
the versatility of the faculty, a production of genius is 
a piece of art which wrought up to its full effect, with 
a felicity of manner acquired by taste and habit, is 
merely the result of certain arbitrary combinations of 
the mind. 

Are we then to reduce the works of a man of genius 
to a mere sport of his talents — a game in which he is 
only the best player? Can he whose secret power 
raises so many emotions in our breasts, be without any 
in his own ? A mere actor performing a part ? Is he 
unfeeling when he is pathetic, indifferent when he is 
indignant ? Is he an alien to all the wisdom and virtue 
he inspires ? No ! were men of genius themselves to 
assert this, and it is said some incline so to do, there is 
a more certain conviction than their misconceptions, in 
our own consciousness, which for ever assures us, that 
deep feelings and elevated thoughts can alone spring 
from those who feel deeply and think nobly. 

In proving that the character of the man may be very 
opposite to that of his writings, we must recollect that 
the habits of the life may be contrary to the habits of 
the mind*. The influence of their studies over men of 
genius is limited. Out of the ideal world, man is 

* Nothing is more delightful to me in my researches on the literary 
character, than when I find in persons of unquestionable and high genius 
the results of my own discoveries. This circumstance has frequently 
happened to confirm my principles. Long after this was published, 
Madame de Stael made this important confession in her recent work,. 
" Dix Annees d'Exil," p. 154. " Je ne pouvois me dissimuler que 
jc n'etois pas une personne courageuse ; j'ai dc la hardiessc dans Vima- 
gination, mais de la timidite dans le caraciere." 






THE HISTORY OF GENIUS. 311 

reduced to be the active creature of sensation. An 
author has, in truth, two distinct characters : the literary, 
formed by the habits of his study ; the personal, by the 
habits of his situation. Gray, cold, effeminate, and 
timid in his personal, was lofty and awful in his literary 
character. We see men of polished manners and bland 
affections, who, in grasping a pen, are thrusting a 
poniard ; while others in domestic life with the simpli- 
city of children and the feebleness of nervous affections, 
can shake the senate or the bar with the vehemence of 
their eloquence and the intrepidity of their spirit. The 
writings of the famous Baptista Porta are marked by 
the boldness of his genius, which formed a singular con- 
trast with the pusillanimity of his conduct when menaced 
or attacked. The heart may be feeble though the mind is 
strong. To think boldly may be the habit of the mind, 
to act weakly may be the habit of the constitution. 

However the personal character may contrast with 
that of their genius, still are the works themselves 
genuine, and exist as realities for us — and were so 
doubtless to the composers themselves, in the act of 
composition. In the calm of study, a beautiful ima- 
gination may convert him, whose morals are corrupt, 
into an admirable moralist, awakening feelings which 
yet may be cold in the business of life : as we have 
shown that the phlegmatic can excite himself into wit, 
and the cheerful man delight in " Night Thoughts." 
Sallust, the corrupt Sallust, might retain the most 
sublime conceptions of the virtues which were to save 
the Republic ; and Sterne, w T hose heart was not so sus- 
ceptible in ordinary occurrences, while he was gradually 
creating incident after incident and touching successive 



312 PARADOXICAL APPEARANCES. 

emotions, in the stories of Le Fevre and Maria, might 
have thrilled— like some of his readers. Many have 
mourned over the wisdom or the virtue they contem- 
plated, mortified at their own infirmity. Thus, though 
there may be no identity between the book and the 
man, still for us, an author is ever an abstract being, 
and, as one of the Fathers said, (i a dead man may sin 
dead, leaving books that make others sin." An author's 
wisdom or his folly does not die with him. The volume 
not the author, is our companion, and is for us a real 
personage, performing before us whatever it inspires; 
" He being dead, yet speaketh." Such is the vitality 
of a book ! 






THE MAN OF LETTERS. 313 



CHAPTER XXI. 

The man of letters. — Occupies an intermediate station between authors 
and readers. — His solitude described. — Often the father of genius. — 
Atticus, a man of letters of antiquity. — The perfect character of a 
modern man of letters exhibited in Peiresc. — Their utility to authors 
and artists. 

Among the active members of the literary republic, 
there is a class whom formerly we distinguished by the 
title of Men of Letters, a title which, with us, has 
nearly gone out of currency, though I do not think that 
the genera] term of " literary men" would be sufficiently 
appropriate. 

The man of letters, whose habits and whose whole 
life so closely resemble those of an author, can only be 
distinguished by this simple circumstance, that the man 
of letters is not an author. 

Yet he whose sole occupation through life is litera- 
ture, he who is always acquiring and never producing, 
appears as ridiculous as the architect who never raised an 
edifice, or the statuary who refrains from sculpture. His 
pursuits are reproached with terminating in an epicurean 
selfishness, and amidst his incessant avocations he him- 
self is considered as a particular sort of idler. 

This race of literary characters, as we now find them, 
could not have appeared till the press had poured 
forth its affluence. In the degree that the nations of 
Europe became literary, was that philosophical curiosity 
kindled, which induced some to devote their fortunes 



314 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AUTHORS AND 

and their days, and to experience some of the purest of 
human enjoyments, in preserving and familiarising 
themselves with " the monuments of vanished minds," 
as books are called by D'Avenant with so much sub- 
limity. Their expansive library presents an inde- 
structible history of the genius of every people, through 
all their seras — and whatever men have thought and 
whatever men have done, were at length discovered in 
books. 

Men of letters occupy an intermediate station between 
authors and readers. They are gifted with more curi- 
osity of knowledge and more multiplied tastes, and by 
those precious collections which they are forming during 
their lives, are more completely furnished with the 
means than are possessed by the multitude who read, 
and the few who write. 

The studies of an author are usually restricted to 
particular subjects. His tastes are tinctured by their 
colouring, his mind is always shaping itself by their 
form. An author's works form his solitary pride, and 
his secret power ; while half his life wears away in the 
slow maturity of composition, and still the ambition of 
authorship torments its victim alike in disappointment 
or in possession. 

But soothing is the solitude of the Man of Letters ! 
View the busied inhabitant of the library surrounded 
by the objects of his love ! He possesses them — and 
they possess him ! Those volumes — images of our mind 
and passions ! — as he traces them from Herodotus to 
Gibbon, from Homer to Shakespeare — those portfolios, 
which gather up the inventions of genius, and tlat 
selected cabinet of medals, which holds so i* ' , > 






MERE MEN OF LETTERS. 315 



unwritten histories ; — some favourite sculptures and 
pictures, and some antiquities of all nations, here and 
there about his house — these are his furniture ! 

In his unceasing occupations the only repose he re- 
quires, consists, not in quitting but in changing them. 
Every day produces its discovery ; every day in the life 
of a man of letters may furnish a multitude of emotions 
and of ideas. For him there is a silence amidst the 
world ; and in the scene, ever opening before him, all 
that has passed is acted over again, and all that is to 
come seems revealed as in a vision. Often his library 
is contiguous to his chamber *, and this domain " parva 
sed apta," this contracted space, has often marked the 
boundary of the existence of the opulent owner, who 
lives where he will die ; contracting his days into hours : 
and a whole life thus passed is found too short to close 
its designs. Such are the men who have not been un- 
happily described by the Hollanders as lief-helbers, 
lovers or fanciers, and their collections as lief-kebbery, 
things of their love. The Dutch call everything for 



* The contiguity of the chamber to the library is not the solitary 
fancy of an individual, hut marks the class. Early in life, when in 
France and Holland, I met with several of these amateurs, who had 
hounded their lives by the circle of their collections, and were rarely 
seen out of them. The late Duke of Roxburgh once expressed, his 
delight to a literary friend of mine, that he had only to step from his sleep- 
ing apartment into his fine library ; so that he could command, at all 
moments, the gratification of pursuing his researches while he indulged 
his reveries. The Chevalier Verhulst, of Bruxelles, of whom we have 
a curious portrait prefixed to the catalogue of his pictures and curiosi- 
ties, was one of those men of letters who experienced this strong affection 
for his collections, and to such a degree, that he never went out of his 
house for twenty years ; where, however, he kept up a courteous inter- 
course with the lovers of art and literature. He was an enthusiastic 
votary of Rubens, of whom he has written a copious life in Dutch, the 
only work he appears to have composed. 



316 



RECLUSE LIFE OP 



which they are impassioned lief-hebbery ; but their feel- 
ing being much stronger than their delicacy, they apply 
the term to everything from poesy and picture to tulips 
and tobacco. The term wants the melody of the lan- 
guages of genius ; but something parallel is required to 
correct that indiscriminate notion which most persons 
associate with that of collectors. 

It was fancifully said of one of these lovers, in the 
style of the age, that " His book was his bride, and his 
study his bride-chamber." Many have voluntarily re- 
linquished a public station and their rank in society, 
neglecting even their fortune and their health, for the 
life of self-oblivion of the man of letters. Count de 
Caylus expended a princely income in the study and 
the encouragement of Art. He passed his mornings 
among the studios of artists, watching their progress, 
increasing his collections, and closing his day in the 
retirement of his own cabinet. His rank and his opu- 
lence were no obstructions to his settled habits. Cicero 
himself, in his happier moments, addressing Atticus, 
exclaimed — " I had much rather be sitting on your 
little bench under Aristotle's picture, than in the curule 
chairs of our great ones." This wish was probably sin- 
cere, and reminds us of another great politician who in 
his secession from public affairs retreated to a literary 
life, where he appears suddenly to have discovered a 
new-found world. Fox's favourite line, which he often 
repeated, was, 



" How various his employments 
Calls idle!" 



•horn the world 



De Sacy, one of the Port-Royalists, was fond of re- 
peating this lively remark of a man of wit : — " that all 



MEN OF LETTERS. 317 

the mischief in the world comes from not being able to 
keep ourselves quiet in our room." 

But tranquillity is essential to the existence of the 
man of letters — an unbroken and devotional tranquillity. 
For though, unlike the author, his occupations are inter- 
rupted without inconvenience, and resumed without 
effort ; yet if the painful realities of life break into this 
visionary world of literature and art, there is an atmo- 
sphere of taste about him which will be dissolved, and 
harmonious ideas which will be chased away, as it hap- 
pens when something is violently flung among the trees 
where the birds are singing ; all instantly disperse ! 

Even to quit their collections for a short time is a real 
suffering to these lovers ; everything which surrounds 
them becomes endeared by habit, and by some higher 
associations. Men of letters have died with grief from 
having been forcibly deprived of the use of their libra- 
ries. De Thou, with all a brother's sympathy, in his 
great history, has recorded the sad fates of several who 
had witnessed their collections dispersed in the civil wars 
of France, or had otherwise been deprived of their 
precious volumes. Sir Robert Cotton fell ill, and 
betrayed, in the ashy paleness of his countenance, the 
misery which killed him on the sequestration of his col- 
lections. " They have broken my heart who have locked 
up my library from me," was his lament. 

If this passion for acquisition and enjoyment be so 
strong and exquisite, what wonder that these " lovers" 
should regard all things as valueless in comparison with 
the objects of their love? There seem to be spells in 
their collections, and in their fascination they have often 
submitted to the ruin of their personal, but not of their 



MEN OF LETTERS. 



internal enjoyments. They have scorned to balance in 
the scales the treasures of literature and art, though 
imperial magnificence once was ambitious to outweigh 
them. 

Van Praun, a friend of Albert Durer's, of whom we 
possess a catalogue of pictures and prints, was one of 
these enthusiasts of taste. The Emperor of Germany, 
probably desirous of finding a royal road to a rare col- 
lection, sent an agent to procure the present one entire ; 
and that some delicacy might be observed with such a 
man, the purchase was to be proposed in the form of a 
mutual exchange; the emperor had gold, pearls, and 
diamonds. Our Uef-hehber having silently listened to 
the imperial agent, seemed astonished that such thino-s 
should be considered as equivalents for a collection of 
works of art, which had required a long life of experience 
and many previous studies and practised tastes to have 
formed, and compared with which gold, pearls, and dia- 
monds, afforded but a mean, an unequal, and a barbarou 
barter. 

If the man of letters be less dependent on others for 
the very perception of his own existence, than men of 
the world are ; his solitude however is not that of a 
desert : for all there tends to keep alive those concen- 
trated feelings which cannot be indulged with security, 
or even without ridicule in general society. Like the 
Lucullus of Plutarch, he would not only live amono- the 
votaries of literature, but would live for them ; he throws 
open his library, his gallery, and his cabinet to all the 
Grecians. Such men are the fathers of genius ; they 
seem to possess an aptitude in discovering those minds 
which are clouded over by the obscurity of their situ- 



MEN OF LETTERS. 319 

ations ; and it is they who so frequently project those 
benevolent institutions, where they have poured out the 
philanthropy of their hearts in that world which they 
appear to have forsaken. If Europe be literary, to 
whom does she owe this more than to these men of 
letters ? Is it not to their noble passion of amassing 
through life those magnificent collections, which often 
bear the names of their founders from the gratitude of 
a following age ? Venice, Florence, and Copenhagen, 
Oxford and London, attest the existence of their labours. 
Our Bodleys and our Harleys, our Cottons and our 
Sloanes, our Cracherodes, our Townleys, and our 
Banks, were of this race ! In the perpetuity of their 
own studies they felt as if they were extending human 
longevity, by throwing an unbroken light of knowledge 
into the next age. The private acquisitions of a solitary 
man of letters during half a century have become public 
endowments. A generous enthusiasm inspired these 
intrepid labours, and their voluntary privations of what 
the world calls its pleasures and its honours, would form 
an interesting history not yet written ; their due, yet 
undischarged. 

But " men of the world," as they are emphatically 
distinguished, imagine that a man so lifeless in "the 
world" must be one of the dead in it, and, with 
mistaken wit, would inscribe over the sepulchre of his 
library, " Here lies the body of our friend." If the 
man of letters have voluntarily quitted their " world," 
at least he has passed into another, where he enjoys a 
sense of existence through a long succession of ages, 
and where Time, who destroys all things for others, for 
him only preserves and discovers. This world is best 



320 MEN OF LETTERS. 

described by one who lias lingered among its inspirations. 
" We are wafted into other times and strange lands, 
connecting us by a sad but exalting relationship with 
the great events and great minds which have passed 
away. Our studies at once cherish and control th< 
imagination, by leading it over an unbounded range o 
the noblest scenes in the overawing company of departed 
wisdom and genius*." 

Living more with books than with men, which is 
often becoming better acquainted with man himself, 
though not always with men, the man of letters is 
more tolerant of opinions than opinionists are among 
themselves. Nor are his views of human affairs con- 
tracted to the day, like those who in the heat and hurry 
of a too active life, prefer expedients to principles ; men 
who deem themselves politicians because they are not 
moralists ; to whom the centuries behind have conveyed 
no results, and who cannot see how the present time is 
always full of the future. " Everything," says the 
lively Burnet, " must be brought to the nature of 
tinder or gunpowder, ready for a spark to set it on fire," 
before they discover it. The man of letters indeed is 
accused of a cold indifference to the interests which 
divide society ; he is rarely observed as the head or the 
"rump of a party;" he views at a distance their tem- 
porary passions — those mighty beginnings, of which h 
knows the miserable terminations. 

Antiquity presents the character of a perfect mar. o 
letters in Attic us, who retreated from a political to a 
literary life. Had his letters accompanied those o 
Cicero, they would have illustrated the ideal character 

* Quarterly Review, No. XXXIII. p. 145. 



TOLERANT OP THEIR OPINIONS. 321 

of his class. But the sage Atticus rejected a popular 
celebrity for a passion not less powerful, yielding up 
his whole soul to study. Cicero, with all his devotion 
to literature, was at the same time agitated by another 
kind of glory, and the most perfect author in Rome 
imagined that he was enlarging his honours by the 
intrigues of the consulship. He has distinctly marked 
the character of the man of letters in the person of his 
friend Atticus, for which he has expressed his respect, 
although he could not content himself with its imitation. 
St I know," says this man of genius and ambition, " I 
know the greatness and ingenuousness of your soul, nor 
have I found any difference between us, but in a different 
choice of life ; a certain sort of ambition has led me 
earnestly to seek after honours, while other motives, by 
no means blamable, induced you to adopt an honourable 
leisure; honestum otium*." These motives appear in 
the interesting memoirs of this man of letters ; a con- 
tempt of political intrigues combined with a desire to 
escape from the splendid bustle of Rome to the learned 
leisure of Athens. He wished to dismiss a pompous 
train of slaves for the delight of assembling under his 
roof a literary society of readers and transcribers. 
And having collected under that roof the portraits or 
busts of the illustrious men of his country, inspired by 
their spirit and influenced by their virtues or their 
genius, he inscribed under them, in concise verses, the 
characters of their mind. Valuing wealth only for its 
use, a dignified economy enabled him to be profuse, and 
a moderate expenditure allowed him to be generous. 
The result of this literary life was the strong affections 
* Ad Atticum, Lib. i. Ep. 17. 
Y 



322 DISPOSITIONS OF 

of the Athenians. At the first opportunity the absence 
of the man of letters offered, they raised a statue to 
him, conferring on our Pomponius the fond surname of 
Attictjs. To have received a name from the voice of 
the city they inhabited, has happened to more than one 
man of letters. Pinelli, born a Neapolitan, but re- 
siding at Venice, among other peculiar honours received 
from the senate, was there distinguished by the affec- 
tionate title of " the Venetian." 

Yet such a character as Atticus could not escape 
censure from "men of the world." They want the 
heart and the imagination to conceive something better 
than themselves. The happy indifference, perhaps the 
contempt, of our Atticus for rival factions, they have 
stigmatized as a cold neutrality, a timid pusillanimous 
hypocrisy. Yet Atticus could not have been a mutual 
friend, had not both parties alike held the man of letters 
as a sacred being amidst their disguised ambition ; and 
the urbanity of Atticus, while it balanced the fierceness 
of two heroes, Pompey and Caesar, could even temper 
the rivalry of genius in the orators Hortensius and 
Cicero. A great man of our own country widely 
differed from the accusers of Atticus. Sir Matthew 
Hale lived in distracted times, and took the character 
of our man of letters for his model, adopting two prin- 
ciples in the conduct of the Roman. He engaged him- 
self with no party business, and afforded a constant 
relief to the unfortunate, of whatever party. He was 
thus preserved amidst the contests of the times. 

If the personal interests of the man of letters be not 
deeply involved in society, his individual prosperity, 
however, is never contrary to public happiness. Other 



MEN OF LETTERS. 323 

professions necessarily exist by the conflict and the 
calamities of the community ; the politician becomes 
great by hatching an intrigue ; the lawyer in counting 
his briefs; the physician his sick-list; the soldier is 
clamorous for war, the merchant riots on high prices. 
But the man of letters only calls for peace and books, 
to unite himself with his brothers scattered over Europe ; 
and his usefulness can only be felt at those intervals, 
when, after a long interchange of destruction, men 
recovering their senses, discover that " knowledge is 
power." Burke, whose ample mind took in every 
conception of the literary character, has finely touched 
. on the distinction between this order of contemplative 
, men, and the other active classes of society. In ad- 
dressing Mr. Malone, whose real character was that of 
a man of letters who first showed us the neglected 
state of our literary history, Burke observed, for I 
•shall give his own words, always too beautiful to alter — 
If you are not called to exert your great talents, and 
employ your great acquisitions in the transitory service 
of your country, which is done in active life ; you will 
continue to do it that permanent service which it 
; receives from the labours of those who know how to 
make the silence of closets more beneficial to the world 
than all the noise and bustle of courts, senates, and 
camps." 

A moving picture of the literary life of a man of 
letters who was no author, would have been lost to us, 
had not Peiresc found in Gassendi a twin spirit. So 
intimate was that biographer with the very thoughts, 
so closely united in the same pursuits, and so perpetual 
an observer of the remarkable man whom he has im- 
y2 



324 PERFECT CHARACTER OF A 

mortalized, that when employed on this elaborate 
resemblance of his friend, he was only painting himself 
with all the identifying strokes of self-love *. 

It was in the vast library of Pinelli, the founder of 
the most magnificent one in Europe, that Peiresc, 
then a youth, felt the remote hope of emulating the 
man of letters before his eyes. His life was not without 
preparation, nor without fortunate coincidences, but 
there was a grandeur of design in the execution, which 
originated in the genius of the man himself. 

The curious genius of Peiresc was marked by its 
precocity, as usually are strong passions in strong 
minds ; this intense curiosity was the germ of all those 
studies which seemed mature in his youth. He early 
resolved on a personal intercourse with the great literary 
characters of Europe ; and his friend has thrown over 
these literary travels that charm of detail by which we 
accompany Peiresc into the libraries of the learned ; 
there with the historian opening new sources of history, 
or with the critic correcting manuscripts, and settling 
points of erudition ; or by the opened cabinet of the 
antiquary, decyphering obscure inscriptions, and ex- 
plaining medals. In the galleries of the curious in art, 
among their marbles, their pictures, and their prints, 
Peiresc has often revealed to the artist some secret in 
his own art. In the museum of the naturalist, or the 
garden of the botanist, there was no rarity of nature, 
on which he had not something to communicate. His 

* " I suppose,'' writes Evelyn, that most agreeable enthusiast of 
literature, to a travelling friend, " that you carry the life of that in- 
comparable virtuoso always about you in your motions, not only because 
it is portable, but for that it is written by the pen of the great Gas 
6endus." 






MODERN MAN OF LETTERS. 325 



mind toiled with that impatience of knowledge, that 
becomes a pain only when the mind is not on the 
advance. In England Peiresc was the associate of 
Camden and Selden, and had more than one interview 
with that friend to literary men, our calumniated James 
the First. One may judge by these who were the men 
whom Peiresc sought, and by whom he himself was 
ever after sought. Such, indeed, were immortal friend- 
ships ! Immortal they may be justly called, from the 
objects in which they concerned themselves, and from 
the permanent results of the combined studies of such 
friends. 

Another peculiar greatness in this literary character 
was Peiresc s enlarged devotion to literature out of its 
purest love for itself alone. He made his own universal 
curiosity the source of knowledge to other men. Con- 
sidering the studious as forming but one great family 
wherever they were, for Peiresc the national reposi- 
tories of knowledge in Europe formed but one collection 
for the world. This man of letters had possessed him- 
self of their contents, that he might have manuscripts 
collated, unedited pieces explored, extracts supplied, 
and even draughtsmen employed in remote parts of the 
world, to furnish views and plans, and to copy antiqui- 
ties for the student, who in some distant retirement 
often discovered that the literary treasures of the world 
were unfailingly opened to him by the secret devotion 
of this man of letters. 

Carrying on the same grandeur in his views, his uni- 
versal mind busied itself in every part of the habitable 
globe. He kept up a noble traffic with all travellers, 
supplying them with philosophical instruments and recent 



326 PERFECT CHARACTER OF A 

inventions, by which he facilitated their discoveries, 
and secured their reception even in barbarous realms. 
In return he claimed, at his own cost, for he was " born 
rather to give than to receive," says Gassendi, fresh im- 
portations of oriental literature, curious antiquities, or 
botanic rarities; and it was the curiosity of Peiresc 
which first embellished his own garden, and thence the 
gardens of Europe, with a rich variety of exotic flowers 
and fruits. Whenever presented with a medal, a vase, 
or a manuscript, he never slept over the gift till he had 
discovered what the donor delighted in ; and a book, a 
picture, or a plant, when money could not be offered, 
fed their mutual passion, and sustained the general 
cause of science. The correspondence of Peiresc 
branched out to the farthest bounds of Ethiopia, con- 
nected both Americas, and had touched the newly dis- 
covered extremities of the universe, when this intrepid 
mind closed in a premature death. 

I have drawn this imperfect view of Peiresc's 
character, that men of letters may be reminded of the 
capacities they possess. In the character of Peiresc, 
however, there still remains another peculiar feature. 
His fortune was not great ; and when he sometimes en- 
dured the reproach of those whose sordidness was startled 
at his prodigality of mind, and the great objects which 
were the result, Peiresc replied, that " a small matter 
suffices for the natural wants of a literary man, whose 
true wealth consists in the monuments of arts, the 
treasures of his library, and the brotherly affections of 
the ingenious." Peiresc was a French judge, but he 
supported his rank more by his own character than by 
luxury or parade. He would not wear silk, and no 



MAN OF LETTERS. 327 

tapestry hangings ornamented his apartments ; but the 
walls were covered with the portraits of his literary- 
friends ; and in the unadorned simplicity of his study, 
his books, his papers, and his letters, were scattered 
about him on the tables, the seats, and the floor. 
There, stealing from the world, he would sometimes 
admit to his spare supper his friend Gassendi, " con- 
tent," says that amiable philosopher, " to have me for 
his guest." 

Peiresc, like Pinelli, never published any work. 
These men of letters derived their pleasure, and perhaps 
their pride, from those vast strata of knowledge which 
their curiosity had heaped together in their mighty col- 
lections. They either were not endowed with that 
faculty of genius which strikes out aggregate views, or 
were destitute of the talent of composition which em- 
bellishes minute ones. This deficiency in the minds of such 
men may be attributed to a thirst of learning, which the 
very means to allay can only inflame. From all sides 
they are gathering information; and that knowledge 
seems never perfect to which every day brings new 
acquisitions. With these men, to compose is to hesi- 
tate; and to revise is to be mortified by fresh doubts and 
unsupplied omissions. Peiresc was employed all his 
life on a history of Provence ; but, observes Gassendi, 
" He could not mature the birth of his literary offspring, 
or lick it into any shape of elegant form ; he was there- 
fore content to take the midwife's part, by helping the 
happier labours of others." 

Such are the cultivators of knowledge, who are rarely 
authors, but who are often, however, contributing to 
the works of others ; and without whose secret labours 
the public would not have possessed many valued ones. 



328 UTILITY OP MEN OF LETTERS 

The delightful instruction which these men are con- 
stantly offering to authors and to artists, flows from 
their silent but uninterrupted cultivation of literature 
and the arts. 

When Robertson, after his successful History of Scot- 
land, was long irresolute in his designs, and still unprac- 
tised in that curious research which habitually occupies 
these men of letters, his admirers had nearly lost his 
popular productions, had not a fortunate introduction 
to Dr. Birch enabled him to open the clasped books, 
and to drink of the sealed fountains. Robertson has 
confessed his inadequate knowledge, and his overflowing 
gratitude, in letters which I have elsewhere printed. 
A suggestion by a man of letters has opened the career 
of many an aspirant. A hint from Walsh conveyed a 
new conception of English poetry to one of its masters. 
The celebrated treatise of Grotius on " Peace and 
War" was projected by Peiresc. It was said of Ma- 
gliabechi, who knew all books, and never wrote one, 
that by his diffusive communications he was in some 
respect concerned in all the great works of his times. 
Sir Robert Cotton greatly assisted Camden and Speed; 
and that hermit of literature, Baker of Cambridge, was 
ever supplying with his invaluable researches Burnet, 
Kennet, Hearne, and Middleton. The concealed aid 
which men of letters afford authors, may be compared 
to those subterraneous streams, which, flowing into 
spacious lakes, are, though unobserved, enlarging the 
waters which attract the public eye. 

Count De Caylus, celebrated for his collections, and 
for his generous patronage of artists, has given the last 
touches to this picture of the man of letters, with all 
the delicacy and warmth of a self-painter. 



TO AUTHORS AND ARTISTS. 329 

" His glory is confined to the mere power which he 
has of being one day useful to letters and to the arts ; 
for his whole life is employed in collecting materials of 
which learned men and artists make no use till after 
the death of him who amassed them. It affords him a 
very sensible pleasure to labour in hopes of being useful 
to those who pursue the same course of studies, while 
there are so great a number who die without discharging 
the debt which they incur to society." 

Such a man of letters appears to have been the late Lord 
Woodhouselee. Mr. Mackenzie, returning from his 
lordship's literary retirement, meeting Mr. Alison, finely 
said, that " he hoped he was going to Woodhouselee ; 
for no man could go there without being happier, or 
return from it without being better." 

Shall we then hesitate to assert, that this class of 
literary men forms a useful, as well as a select order in 
society ? We see that their leisure is not idleness, that 
their studies are not unfruitful for the public, and that 
their opinions, purified from passions and prejudices, are 
always the soundest in the nation. They are counsellors 
whom statesmen may consult ; fathers of genius to whom 
authors and artists may look for aid, and friends of all 
nations ; for we ourselves have witnessed, during a war of 
thirty years, that the men of letters in England were 
still united with their brothers in France. The abode of 
Sir Joseph Banks was ever open to every literary and 
scientific foreigner ; while a wish expressed, or a com- 
munication written by this man of letters, was even 
respected by a political power which, acknowledging no 
other rights, paid a voluntary tribute to the claims of 
science and the privileges of literature. 



330 LITERARY OLD AGE 



CHAPTER XXII. 

Literary old age still learning. — Influence of late studies in life. — 
Occupations in advanced age of the literary character. — Of literary 
men who have died at their studies. 

The old age of the literary character retains its enjoy- 
ments, and usually its powers — a happiness which ac- 
companies no other. The old age of coquetry witnesses 
its own extinct beauty ; that of the " used" idler is left 
without a sensation ; that of the grasping Croesus exists 
only to envy his heir ; and that of the Machiavel who 
has no longer a voice in the cabinet, is but an unhappy 
spirit lingering to find its grave : but for the aged man 
of letters memory returns to her stores, and imagination 
is still on the wing amidst fresh discoveries and new de- 
signs. The others fall like dry leaves, but he drops 
like ripe fruit, and is valued when no longer on the tree. 

The constitutional melancholy of Johnson often tinged 
his views of human life. When he asserted that " no 
man adds much to his stock of knowledge, or improves 
much after forty," his theory was overturned by his 
own experience ; for his most interesting works were 
the productions of a very late period of life, formed out 
of the fresh knowledge with which he had then furnished 
himself. 

The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, are 
often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. The curious 
mind is still striking out into new pursuits, and the mind 
of geniusis still creating. Ancora imparo ! — " Even yet 



CONTINUES TO ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE. 331 

I am learning !* was the concise inscription on an inge- 
nious device of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, with 
an hour-glass upon it, which, it is said, Michael Angelo 
applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth year. 
Painters have improved even to extreme old age : 
West's last works were his best, and Titian was 
greatest on the verge of his century. Poussin was de- 
lighted with the discovery of this circumstance in the 
lives of painters. "Asl grow older, I feel the desire 
of surpassing myself." And it was in the last years of 
his life, that with the finest poetical invention, he painted 
the allegorical pictures of the Seasons. A man of letters 
in his sixtieth year once told me, " It is but of late years 
that I have learnt the right use of books and the art of 
reading." 

Time, the great destroyer of other men's happiness, 
only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its pos- 
sessor. A learned and highly intellectual friend once 
said to me, " If I have acquired more knowledge these 
last four years than I had hitherto, I shall add mate- 
rially to my stores in the next four years ; and so at 
every subsequent period of my life, should I acquire 
only in the same proportion, the general mass of my 
knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we are not de- 
prived by nature or misfortune of the means to pursue 
this perpetual augmentation of knowledge, I do not see 
but we may be still fully occupied and deeply interested 
even to the last day of our earthly term." Such is the 
delightful thought of Owen Feltham ; " If I die to- 
morrow, my life will be somewhat the sweeter to-day 
for knowledge." The perfectibility of the human 
mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Stael, 



)F LATE STUDIES. 

consists in the mass of our ideas, to which every age 
will now add, by means unknown to preceding genera T 
tions. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her 
arts find a term to their progress ; but there is no 
boundary to knowledge nor the discovery of thought. 

How beautiful in the old age of the literary character 
was the plan which a friend of mine pursued. His 
mind, like a mirror whose quicksilver had not decayed, 
reflected all objects to the last. Full of learned studies 
and versatile curiosity, he annually projected a summer- 
tour on the Continent to some remarkable spot. The 
local associations were an unfailing source of agreeable 
impressions to a mind so well prepared, and he presented 
his friends with a " Voyage Litteraire," as a new-year's 
gift. In such pursuits, where life is " rather wearing 
out than rusting out," as Bishop Cumberland expressed 
it, scarcely shall we feel those continued menaces of 
death which shake the old age of men of no intellectual 
pursuits, who are dying so many years. 

Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, consti- 
tute the happiness of literary men. The study of the 
arts and literature spreads a sunshine over the winter of 
their days. In the solitude and the night of human life, 
they discover that unregarded kindness of nature, which 
has given flowers that only open in the evening, and 
only bloom through the night-season. Necker perceived 
the influence of late studies in life ; for he tells us, that 
" the era of threescore and ten is an agreeable age for 
writing ; your mind has not lost its vigour, and envy 
leaves you in peace." 

The opening of one of La Motiie le Vayer's Trea- 
tises is striking : " I should but ill return the favours 



INFLUENCE OF LATE STUDIES. 333 

God has granted me in the eightieth year of my age, 
should I allow myself to give way to that shameless 
want of occupation which all my life I have con- 
demned ;" and the old man proceeds with his " Observa- 
tions on the Composition and Reading of Books." " If 
man be a bubble of air, it is then time that I should 
hasten my task ; for my eightieth year admonishes me 
to get my baggage together ere I leave the world," 
wrote Varro, in opening his curious treatise de Re Rus- 
tica, which the sage lived to finish, and which, afternearly 
two thousand years, the world possesses. " My works 
are many, and I am old ; yet I still can fatigue and tire 
myself with writing more," says Petrarch in his 
Epistle to Posterity. The literary character has been 
fully occupied in the eightieth and the ninetieth year of 
life. Isaac Walton still glowed while writing some 
of the most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth 
year, and in the ninetieth enriched the poetical world 
with the first publication of a romantic tale by Chalk- 
hill, " the friend of Spenser." Bodmer, beyond eighty, 
was occupied on Homer, and Wieland on Cicero's 
Letters. * 

But the delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new 
course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of 
youth even to old age. The revolutions of modern 
chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr. Reid to his latest 
days, and he studied by various means, to prevent the 
decay of his faculties, and to remedy the deficiencies of 
one failing sense by the increased activity of another. 
A late popular author, when advanced in life, discovered, 



* See Curiosities of Literature, on " The progress of old age in new 
studies." 



334 INFLUENCE OF LATE STUDIES. 

in a class of reading to which he had never been accus- 
tomed, a profuse supply of fresh furniture for his mind. 
This felicity was the delightfulness of the old age of 
Goethe— literature, art, and science, formed his daily in- 
quiries; and this venerable genius, prompt to receive each 
novel impression, was a companion for the youthful, and 
a communicator of knowledge even for the most curious. 
Even the steps of time are retraced, and we resume 
the possessions we seemed to have lost ; for in advanced 
life a return to our early studies refreshes and renovates 
the spirits : we open the poets who made us enthusiasts, 
and the philosophers who taught us to think, with a 
new source of feeling acquired by our own experience. 
Adam Smith confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to 
professor Dugald Stewart, while "he was re-perusing, w T ith 
the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient 
Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay openon his table." 

Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, 
Et Sophocle a cent ans peint encore Antigone. 

The calm philosophic Hume found that death only 
could interrupt the keen pleasure he was again receiv- 
ing from Lucian, inspiring at the moment a humorous 
self-dialogue with Charon. " Happily," said this phi- 
losopher, " on retiring from the world, I found my taste 
for reading return, even with greater avidity." We 
find Gibbon, after the close of his History, returning 
with an appetite as keen to " a full repast on Homer and 
Aristophanes, and involving himself in the philosophic 
maze of the writings of Plato." Lord Woodhouselee 
found the recomposition of his " Lectures on History" 
so fascinating in the last period of his life, that Mr. 
Alison informs us, "it rewarded him with that peculiar 



INFLUENCE OF LATE STUDIES. 335 

it, which has been often observed in the later 
years of literary men ; the delight of returning again to 
the studies of their youth, and of feeling under the 
snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring." 

Not without a sense of exultation has the literary 
character felt this peculiar happiness, in the unbroken 
chain of his habits and his feelings. Hobbes exulted 
that he had outlived his enemies, and was still the same 
Hobbes; and to demonstrate the reality of this existence, 
published, in the eighty-seventh year of his age, his 
version of the Odyssey, and the following year, his Iliad. 
Of the happy results of literary habits in advanced life, 
the Count De Tressan, the elegant abridger of the old 
French romances, in his "literary advice to his children," 
has drawn a most pleasing picture. With a taste for 
study, which he found rather inconvenient in the 
moveable existence of a man of the world, and a military 
wanderer, he had, however, contrived to reserve an hour 
or two every day for literary pursuits. The men of science, 
with whom he had chiefly associated, appear to have 
turned his passion to observation and knowledge, rather 
than towards imagination and feeling ; the combination 
formed a wreath for his gray hairs. When Count de 
Tressan retired from a brilliant to an affectionate circle, 
amidst his family, he pursued his literary tastes, with the 
vivacity of a young author inspired by the illusion of 
fame. At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination 
of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recomposed his 
old Chivalric Romances, and his reanimated fancy 
struck fire in the veins of the old man. Among the 
first designs of his retirement was a singular philoso- 
phical legacy for his children. It was a view of the 



336 OCCUPATIONS IN ADVANCED AGE 

history and progress of the human mind — of its princi- 
ples, its errors, and its advantages, as these were 
reflected in himself; in the dawnings of his taste, and 
the secret inclinations of his mind, which the men of 
genius of the age with whom he associated had deve- 
loped. Expatiating on their memory, he calls on his 
children to witness the happiness of study, so evident 
in those pleasures which were soothing and adorning 
his old age. " Without knowledge, without literature," 
exclaims the venerable enthusiast, " in whatever rank 
we are born, we can only resemble the vulgar." To 
the centenary Fontenelle the Count De Tressan was 
chiefly indebted for the happy life he derived from the 
cultivation of literature ; and when this man of a hun- 
dred years died, Tressan, himself on the borders of 
the grave, would offer the last fruits of his mind in an 
eloge to his ancient master. It was' the voice of the 
dying to the dead, a last moment of the love and 
sensibility of genius, which feeble life could not 
extinguish. 

The genius of Cicero, inspired by the love of litera- 
ture, has thrown something delightful over this latest sea- 
son of life, in his de Senectute. To have written on old age, 
in old age, is to have obtained a triumph over Time. * 

When the literary character shall discover himself to 
be like a stranger in a new world, when all that he 
loved has not life, and all that lives has no love for old 
age : when his ear has ceased to listen, and nature has 
locked up the man within himself, he may still expire 
amidst his busied thoughts. Such aged votaries, like 

* Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age, by the Lite Sir Thomas 
Bernard, was written a year or two before he died. 



OF THE LITERARY CHARACTER. 337 

the old bees, have been found dying in their honey- 
combs. Let them preserve but the flame alive on the 
altar, and at the last moments they may be found in 
the act of sacrifice ! The venerable Bede, the instructor 
of his generation and the historian for so many succes- 
sive ones, expired in the act of dictating. Such was 
the fate of Petrarch, who, not long before his death, 
had written to a friend, " I read, I write, I think ; 
such is my life, and my pleasures as they were in my 
youth." Petrarch was found lying on a folio in his 
library, from which volume he had been busied in 
making extracts for the biography of his countrymen. 
His domestics having often observed him studying in 
that reclining posture for days together, it was long 
before they discovered that the poet was no more. The 
fate of Leibnitz was similar : he was found dead 
with the Argenis of Barclay in his hand ; he had been 
studying the style of that political romance as a model 
for his intended history of the House of Brunswick. 
The literary death of Barthelemy affords a remark- 
able proof of the force of uninterrupted habits of study. 
He had been slightly looking over the newspaper, when 
suddenly he called for a Horace, opened the volume, 
and found the passage, on which he paused for a 
moment ; and then, too feeble to speak, made a sign to 
bring him Dacier's ; but his hands were already cold, 
the Horace fell — and the classical and dying man of 
letters sunk into a fainting fit, from which he never 
recovered. Such too was the fate, perhaps now told 
for the first time, of the great Lord Clarendon. It 
was in the midst of composition that his pen suddenly 
dropped from his hand on the paper, he took it up 
z 



338 LITERARY OLD AGE. 

again, and again it dropped : deprived of the sense 
of touch — his hand without motion — the earl per- 
ceived himself struck by palsy — and the life of the 
noble exile closed amidst the warmth of a literary work 
unfinished ! 



UNIVERSALITY OF GENIUS. 339 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Universality of Genius. — Limited notion of genius entertained by the 

ancients Opposite faculties act with diminished force. — Men of 

genius excel only in a single art. 

The ancients addicted themselves to one species of 
composition ; the tragic poet appears not to have entered 
into the province of comedy, nor, as far as we know, 
were their historians writers of verse. Their artists 
worked on the same principle ; and from Pliny's account 
of the ancient sculptors, we may infer that with them 
the true glory of genius consisted in carrying to per- 
fection a single species of their art. They did not 
exercise themselves indifferently on all subjects, but 
cultivated the favourite ones which they had chosen 
from the impulse of their own imagination. The hand 
which could copy nature in a human form, with the 
characteristics of the age and the sex, and the occupa- 
tions of life, refrained from attempting the colossal and 
ideal majesty of a divinity ; and when one of these 
sculptors, whose skill was pre-eminent in casting ani- 
mals, had exquisitely wrought the glowing coursers for 
a triumphal car, he requested the aid of Praxiteles to 
place the driver in the chariot, that his work might not 
be disgraced by a human form of inferior beauty to his 
animals. Alluding to the devotion of an ancient 
\ sculptor to his labours, Madame de Stael has finely 
said, " The history of his life was the history of his 
statue." 

z2 



340 LIMITED NOTION OF GENIUS 

Such was the limited conception which the ancients 
formed of genius. They confined it to particular ob 
jects or departments in art. But there is a tendency 
among men of genius to ascribe an universality of power 
to a master-intellect. Dryden imagined that Virgil 
could have written satire equally with Juvenal, and 
some have hardily defined genius as "a power to accom 
plish all that we undertake." But literary history will 
detect this fallacy, and the failures of so many eminent 
men are instructions from Nature which must not be 
lost on us. 

No man of genius put forth more expansive pro 
mises of universal power than Leibnitz. Science, 
imagination, history, criticism, fertilised the richest of 
human soils ; yet Leibnitz with immense powers and 
perpetual knowledge, dissipated them in the multi 
plicity of his pursuits. " The first of philosophers," 
the late Professor Playfair observed, " has left nothing 
in the immense tract of his intellect which can be dis- 
tinguished as a monument of his genius." As an uni- 
versalist, Voltaire remains unparalleled in ancient or 
in modern times. This voluminous idol of our neigh- 
bours stands without a rival in literature ; but an 
exception, even if this were one, cannot overturn a 
fundamental principle, for we draw our conclusions not 
from the fortune of one man of genius, but from the fate 
of many. The real claims of this great writer to inven- 
tion and originality are as moderate as his size and his 
variety are astonishing. The wonder of his ninety 
volumes is, that he singly consists of a number of men 
of the second order, making up one great man ; for 
unquestionably some could rival Voltaire in any single 



ENTERTAINED BY THE ANCIENTS. 341 

province, but no one but himself has possessed them all. 
Voltaire discovered a new art, that of creating a supple- 
ment to the genius which had preceded him ; and with- 
out Corneille, Racine, and Ariosto, it would be difficult 
to conjecture what sort of a poet Voltaire could have 
been. He was master too of a secret in composition, 
which consisted in a new style and manner. His style 
promotes, but never interrupts thinking, while it ren- 
ders all subjects familiar to our comprehension : his 
manner consists in placing objects well known in new 
combinations ; he ploughed up the fallow lands, and 
renovated the worn-out exhausted soils. Swift denned 
a good style, as " proper words in proper places." 
Voltaire's impulse was of a higher flight, " proper 
thoughts on proper subjects." Swift's idea was that of 
a grammarian. Voltaire's feeling was that of a philo- 
sopher. We are only considering this universal writer 

' in his literary character, which has fewer claims to the 
character of an inventor, than several who never attained 
to his celebrity. 

Are the original powers of genius then limited to a 
single art, and even to departments in that art ? May 
not men of genius plume themselves with the vain 
glory of universality ? Let us dare to call this a vain 
glory ; for he who stands the first in his class, does not 
really add to the distinctive character of his genius, by 

' a versatility which, however apparently successful, is 
always subordinate to the great character on which his 
fame rests. It is only that character which bears the 

• raciness of the soil ; it is only that impulse whose soli- 
tary force stamps the authentic work of genius. To 
execute equally well on a variety of subjects, may raise 



342 OPPOSITE FACULTIES ACT 

a suspicion of the nature of the executive power. 
Should it be mimetic, the ingenious writer may remain 
absolutely destitute of every claim to genius. Du Clos 
has been refused the honours of genius by the French 
critics, because he wrote equally well on a variety of 
subjects. 

I know that this principle is contested by some of 
great name, who have themselves evinced a wonderful 
variety of powers. This penurious principle flatters 
not that egotism which great writers share in common 
with the heroes who have aimed at universal empire. 
Besides, this universality may answer many temporary 
purposes. These writers may however observe, that 
their contemporaries are continually disputing on the 
merits of their versatile productions, and the most con- 
trary opinions are even formed by their admirers ; but 
their great individual character standing by itself, and 
resembling no other, is a positive excellence. It is time 
only, who is influenced by no name, and will never, 
like contemporaries, mistake the true work of genius. 

And if it be true that the primary qualities of the 
mind are so different in men of genius as to render 
them more apt for one class than for another, it would 
seem, that whenever a pre-eminent faculty had shaped 
the mind, a faculty of the most contrary nature must 
act with a diminished force, and the other often with 
an exclusive one. An impassioned and pathetic genius 
has never become equally eminent as a comic genius. 
Richardson and Fielding could not have written each 
other's works. Could Butler, who excelled in wit 
and satire, like Milton have excelled in sentiment and 
imagination ? Some eminent men have shown remark- 



WITH DIMINISHED FORCE. 343 

able failures in their attempts to cultivate opposite 
departments in their own pursuits. The tragedies and 
the comedies of Dryden equally prove that he was not 
blest with a dramatic genius. Cibber, a spirited comic 
writer, was noted for the most degrading failures in 
tragedy ; while Rowe, successful in the softer tones of 
the tragic muse, proved as luckless a candidate for the 
smiles of the comic, as the pathetic Otway. La 
Fontaine, unrivalled humorist as a fabulist, found his 
opera hissed, and his romance utterly tedious. The 
true genius of Sterne was of a descriptive and pathetic 
cast, and his humour and ribaldry were a perpetual 
violation of his natural bent. Alfieri's great tragic 
powers could not strike out into comedy or wit. 
Scarron declared he intended to write a tragedy. The 
experiment was not made, but with his strong cast of 
mind and habitual associations, we probably have lost a 
new sort of " Roman comique." Cicero failed in poetry, 
Addison in oratory, Yoltaire in comedy, and John- 
son in tragedy. The Anacreontic poet remains only 
Anacreontic in his epic. With the fine arts the same 
occurrence has happened. It has been observed in 
painting, that the school eminent for design was de- 
ficient in colouring ; while those who with Titian's 
warmth could make the blood circulate in the flesh, 
could never rival the expression and anatomy of even 
the middling artists of the Roman school. 

Even among those rare and gifted minds which have 
startled us by the versatility of their powers, whence 
do they derive the high character of their genius? 
Their durable claims are substantiated by what is in- 
herent in themselves — what is individual — and not by 



344 MEN OF GENIUS EXCEL 

that flexibility which may include so much which others 
can equal. We rate them by their positive originality, 
not by their variety of powers. When we think of 
Young, it is only of his " Night Thoughts," not of his 
tragedies, nor his poems, nor even of his satires, which 
others have rivalled or excelled. Of Akenside the 
solitary work of genius is his great poem ; his nume- 
rous odes are not of a higher order than those of other 
ode- writers. Had Pope only composed odes and trage- 
dies, the great philosophical poet, master of human life 
and of perfect verse, had not left an undying name. 
Teniers, unrivalled in the walk of his genius, degraded 
history by the meanness of his conceptions. Such 
instances abound, and demonstrate an important truth 
in the history of genius, that we cannot, however we 
may incline, enlarge the natural extent of our genius, 
any more than we can " add a cubit to our stature." 
We may force it into variations, but in multiplying 
mediocrity, or in doing what others can do, we add 
nothing to genius. 

So true is it that men of genius appear only to excel 
in a single art, or even in a single department of art, 
that it is usual with men of taste to resort to a parti- 
cular artist for a particular object. Would you orna- 
ment your house by interior decorations, to whom 
would you apply if you sought the perfection of art, 
but to different artists, of very distinct characters in 
their invention and their execution ? For your Arab- 
esques you would call in the artist whose delicacy of 
touch and playfulness of ideas, are not to be expected 
from the grandeur of the historical painter, or the 
sweetness of the Paysagiste. Is it not evident that men 



ONLY IN A SINGLE ART. 345 

of genius excel only in one department of their art, and 
that whatever they do with the utmost original perfec- 
tion, cannot be equally done by another man of genius ? 
He whose undeviating genius guards itself in its own 
true sphere, has the greatest chance of encountering no 
rival. He is a Dante, a Milton, a Michael Angelo, a 
Raphael : his hand will not labour on what the Italians 
call pasticcios ; and he remains not unimitated, but 
inimitable. 



346 LITERATURE AN AVENUE TO GLORY. 



CHAPTER XXIY. 

Literature an avenue to glory. — An intellectual nobility not chimerical, 
but created by public opinion. — Literary honours of various nations. 
— Local associations with the memory of the man of genius. 

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for 
those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of 
wealth. Like that illustrious Roman who owed nothing 
to his ancestors, videtur ex se natus, these seem self- 
born ; and in the baptism of fame, they have given 
themselves their name. Bruyere has finely said of men 
of genius, " These men have neither ancestors nor poste- 
rity ; they alone compose their whole race." 

But Akenside, we have seen, blushed when his 
lameness reminded him of the fall of one of his father s 
cleavers ; Prior, the son of a vintner, could not endure 
to be reminded, though by his favourite Horace, that 
" the cask retains its flavour ; " like Yoiture, another 
descendant of a marchand du vin, whose heart sickened 
over that which exhilarates all other hearts, whenever 
his opinion of its quality was maliciously consulted. 
All these instances too evidently prove that genius is 
subject to the most vulgar infirmities. 

But some have thought more courageously. The 
amiable Rollin was the son of a cutler, but the historian 
of nations never felt his dignity compromised by his 
birth. Even late in life, he ingeniously alluded to his 
first occupation, for we find an epigram of his in send- 
ing a knife for a new-year's gift, " informing his friend, 



LITERATURE AN AVENUE TO GLORY. 34/ 

that, should this present appear to come rather from 
Vulcan than from Minerva, it should not surprise, for," 
adds the epigrammatist, " it was from the cavern of the 
Cyclops, I began to direct my footsteps towards 
Parnassus." The great political negotiator, Cardinal 
D'Ossat, was elevated by his genius from an orphan 
state of indigence, and was alike destitute of ancestry, 
of titles, even of parents. On the day of his creation, 
when others of noble extraction assumed new titles from 
the seignorial names of their ancient houses, he was at 
a loss to fix on one. Having asked the pope, whether 
he should choose that of his bishopric, his Holiness re- 
quested him to preserve his plain family name, which 
he had rendered famous by his own genius. The sons 
of a sword-maker, a potter, and a tax-gatherer, were 
the greatest of the orators, the most majestic of the 
poets, and the most graceful of the satirists of antiquity ; 
Demosthenes, Virgil, and Horace. The eloquent Mas- 
sillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousseau and Diderot ; 
Johnson, Goldsmith, and Franklin, arose amidst the 
most humble avocations. 

Vespasian raised a statue to the historian Josephus, 
though a Jew ; and the Athenians one to iEsop, though 
a slave. Even among great military republics the road 
to public honour was open, not alone to heroes and 
patricians, but to that solitary genius which derives from 
itself all which it gives to the public, and nothing from 
its birth or the public situation it occupies. 

It is the prerogative of genius to elevate obscure 
men to the higher class of society. If the influence of 
wealth in the present day have created a new aristocracy 
of its own, where they already begin to be jealous of 



348 AN INTELLECTUAL NOBILTTY 

their ranks, we may assert that genius creates a sort of 
intellectual nobility, which is now conferred by public 
feeling ; as heretofore the surnames of " the African," 
and of " Coriolanus," won by valour, associated with 
the names of the conqueror of Africa, and the van- 
quisher of Corioli. Were men of genius as such, to 
have armorial bearings, they might consist, not of 
imaginary things, of griffins and chimeras, but of deeds 
performed and of public works in existence. When 
Dondi raised the great astronomical clock at the Uni- 
versity of Padua which was long the admiration of 
Europe, it gave a name and nobility to its maker and 
all his descendants. There still lives a Marquis Dondi 
dal' Horologio. Sir Hugh Middleton, in memory 
of his vast enterprise, changed his former arms to 
bear three piles, to perpetuate the interesting cir- 
cumstance, that by these instruments he had strength- 
ened the works he had invented, when his genius poured 
forth the waters through our metropolis, thereby dis- 
tinguishing it from all others in the world. Should not 
Evelyn have inserted an oak-tree in his bearings ? for 
his "Sylva" occasioned the plantation of "many mil- 
lions of timber-trees," and the present navy of Great 
Britain has been constructed with the oaks which the 
genius of Evelyn planted. There was an eminent 
Italian musician, who had a piece of music inscribed 
on his tomb ; and I have heard of a Dutch mathema- 
tician, who had a calculation for his epitaph. 

We who were reproached for a coldness in our 
national character, have caught the inspiration and en- 
thusiasm for the works and the celebrity of genius ; the 
symptoms indeed were long dubious. Reynolds wished 



CREATED BY PUBLIC OPINION. 349 

to have one of his own pictures, " Contemplation in 
the figure of an Angel," carried at his funeral ; a 
custom not unusual with foreign painters ; but it was 
not deemed prudent to comply with this last wish of the 
great artist, from the fears entertained as to the manner 
in which a London populace might have received such 
a novelty. This shows that the profound feeling of art 
is still confined within a circle among us, of which, 
hereafter, the circumference perpetually enlarging, may 
embrace even the whole people. If the public have 
borrowed the names of some lords to dignify a " Sand- 
wich" and a "Spencer," we may be allowed to raise 
into titles of literary nobility those distinctions which 
the public voice has attached to some authors ; Msckylus 
Potter, Athenian Stuart, sm&Anacreon Moore. Butler, 
in his own day, w^as more generally known by the sin- 
gle and singular name of Hudibras, than by his own. 

This intellectual nobility is not chimerical. Such 
titles must be found indeed, in the years which are to 
come ; yet the prelude of their fame distinguishes these 
men from the crowd. Whenever the rightful possessor 
appears, will not the eyes of all spectators be fixed on 
him ? I allude to scenes which I have witnessed. Will 
not even literary honours superadd a nobility to nobility ; 
and make aname instantly recognised which might other- 
wise be hidden under its rank, and remain unknown by 
its title ? Our illustrious list of literary noblemen is far 
more glorious than the satirical " Catalogue of Noble 
Authors," drawn up by a polished and heartless cynic, 
who has pointed his brilliant shafts at all who were 
chivalrous in spirit, or related to the family of genius. 
One may presume on the existence of this intellectual 



350 AN INTELLECTUAL NOBILITY 






Mobility, from the extraordinary circumstance that the 
great have actually felt a jealousy of the literary rank. 
But no rivalry can exist in the solitary honour conferred 
on an author. It is not an honour derived from birth 
nor creation, but from public opinion, and inseparable 
from his name, as an essential quality ; for the diamond 
will sparkle and the rose will be fragrant, otherwise it 
is no diamond or rose. The great may well conde- 
scend to be humble to genius, since genius pays its 
homage in becoming proud of that humility. Cardinal 
Richelieu was mortified at the celebrity of the unbend- 
ing Corneille ; so were several noblemen at Pope's 
indifference to their rank ; and Magliabechi, the book 
prodigy of his age, whom every literary stranger visited 
at Florence, assured Lord Raley that the Duke of 
Tuscany had become jealous of the attention he was 
receiving from foreigners, as they usually went to visit 
Magliabechi before the grand duke. 

A confession by Montesquieu states, with open can- 
dour, a fact in his life which confirms this jealousy of 
the great with the literary character. " On my entering 
into life I was spoken of as a man of talents, and peo- 
ple of condition gave me a favourable reception ; but 
when the success of my Persian Letters proved perhaps 
that I was not unworthy of my reputation, and the 
public began to esteem me, my reception with the great 
was discouraging, and I experienced innumerable morti- 
fications." Montesquieu subjoins a reflection sufficiently 
humiliating for the mere nobleman: "The great, in- 
wardly wounded with the glory of a celebrated name, 
seek to humble it. In general he only can patiently 
endure the fame of others, who deserves fame himself." 



CREATED BY PUBLIC OPINION. 351 

This sort of jealousy unquestionably prevailed in the 
late Lord Orford, a wit, a man of the world, and a 
man of rank ; but while he considered literature as a 
mere amusement, he was mortified at not obtaining 
literary celebrity ; he felt his authorial, always beneath 
his personal character. It fell to my lot to develop his 
real feelings respecting himself and the literary men of 
his age.* 

Who was the dignified character, Lord Chesterfield 
or Samuel Johnson, when the great author, proud of his 
protracted and vast labour, rejected his lordship's tardy 
and trivial patronage ? "I value myself," says Swift, 
" upon making the ministry desire to be acquainted 
with Parnell, and not Parnell with the ministry." 
Piron would not suffer the literary character to be 
lowered in his presence. Entering the apartment of a 
nobleman, who was conducting another peer to the 
stair s-head, the latter stopped to make way for Piron : 
" Pass on, my lord," said the noble master ; " pass, he 
is only a poet." Piron replied, " Since our qualities 
are declared, I shall take my rank," and placed himself 
before the lord. Nor is this pride, the true source of 
elevated character, refused to the great artist as well as 
the great author. Michael Angelo, invited by Julius 
II. to the court of Rome, found that intrigue had in- 

* Calamities of Authors, vol. i. I printed, in 1812, extracts from 
Walpole's correspondence with Cole. Some have considered that 
there was a severity of delineation in my character of Horace Walpole. 
I was the first, in my impartial view of his literary character, to pro- 
claim to the world what it has now fully sanctioned, that " His most 
pleasing, if not his great talent, lay in letter-writing ,• here he was 
without a rival. His correspondence abounded with literature, criti- 
cism, and wit of the most original and brilliant composition." This 
was published several years before the recent collection of his letters. 



352 AN INTELLECTUAL NOBILITY 

disposed his Holiness towards him, and more than once 
the great artist was suffered to linger in attendance in 
the ante-chamber. One day the indignant man of ge- 
nius exclaimed, " Tell his Holiness, if he want me, he 
must look for me elsewhere." He flew back to his 
beloved Florence, to proceed with that celebrated car- 
toon which afterwards became a favourite study with 
all artists. Thrice the pope wrote for his return, and 
at length menaced the little state of Tuscany with war, 
if Michael Angelo prolonged his absence. He returned. 
The sublime artist knelt at the feet of the Father of the 
Church, turning aside his troubled countenance in si- 
lence. An intermeddling bishop offered himself as a 
mediator, apologising for our artist by observing, that 
" Of this proud humour are these painters made ! " 
Julius turned to this pitiable mediator, and, as Vasari 
tells, used a switch on this occasion, observing, " You 
speak injuriously of him, while I am silent. It is you 
who are ignorant." Raising Michael Angelo, Julius II. 
embraced the man of genius. 

" I can make lords of you every day, but I cannot 
create a Titian," said the Emperor Charles V. to his 
courtiers, who had become jealous of the hours and the 
half-hours which the monarch stole from them that he 
might converse with the man of genius at his work. 
There is an elevated intercourse between power and 
genius ; and if they are deficient in reciprocal esteem, 
neither are great. The intellectual nobility seems to 
have been asserted by De Harlay, a great French states- 
man ; for when the academy was once not received 
with royal honours, he complained to the French mo- 



CREATED BY PUBLIC OPINION. 353 

presented to Francis I. for the first time, the king 
always advanced three steps from the throne to receive 
him." It is something more than an ingenious thought, 
when Fontenelle, in his eloge on Leibnitz, alluding to 
the death of Queen Anne, adds of her successor, that 
U The Elector of Hanover united under his dominion 
an electorate, the three kingdoms of Great Britain, and 
Leibnitz and Newton." 

If ever the voice of individuals can recompense a life 
of literary labour, it is in speaking a foreign accent. 
This sounds like the distant plaudit of posterity. The 
distance of space between the literary character and the 
inquirer, in some respects represents the distance of 
time which separates the author from the next age. 
Fontenelle was never more gratified than when a 
Swede, arriving at the gates of Paris, inquired of the 
custom-house officers where Fontenelle resided, and ex- 
pressed his indignation that not one of them had ever 
heard of his name. Hobbes expresses his proud delight 
that his portrait was sought after by foreigners, and 
that the Great Duke of Tuscany made the philosopher 
the object of his first inquiries. Camden was not in- 
sensible to the visits of German noblemen, who were 
desirous of seeing the British Pliny ; and Pocock, 
while he received no aid from patronage at home for 
his Oriental studies, never relaxed in those unrequited 
labours, animated by the learned foreigners, who hast- 
ened to see and converse with this prodigy of eastern 
learning. 

Yes ! to the very presence of the man of genius will 
the world spontaneously pay their tribute of respect, of 
admiration, or of love. Many a pilgrimage has he lived 

A A 



354 LITERARY HONOURS 

to receive, and many a crowd has followed his foot- 
steps ! There are days in the life of genius which repay 
its sufferings. Demosthenes confessed he was pleased 
when even a fishwoman of Athens pointed him out. 
Corneille had his particular seat in the theatre, and 
the audience would rise to salute him when he entered. 
At the presence of Raynal in the House of Commons, 
the speaker was requested to suspend the debate till 
that illustrious foreigner, who had written on the En- 
glish parliament, was accommodated with a seat. 
Spinosa, when he gained an humble livelihood by grind- 
ing optical glasses, at an obscure village in Holland, 
was visited by the first general in Europe, who for the 
sake of this philosophical conference, suspended the 
inarch of the army. 

In all ages and in all countries has this feeling been 
created. It is neither a temporary ebullition, nor an 
individual honour. It comes out of the heart of man. 
It is the passion of great souls. In Spain, whatever 
was most beautiful in its kind was described by the 
name of the great Spanish bard ; every thing excellent 
was called a Lope. Italy would furnish a volume of 
the public honours decreed to literary men ; nor is that 
spirit extinct, though the national character has fallen 
by the chance of fortune. Metastasio and Tirabos- 
chi received what had been accorded to Petrarch and 
to Poggio. Germany, patriotic to its literary characters, 
is the land of the enthusiasm of genius. On the bor- 
ders of the Linnet, in the public walk of Zurich, the 
monument of Gesner, erected by the votes of his fel- 
low-citizens, attests their sensibility; and a solemn 
funeral honoured the remains of Klopstock, led by 



OP VARIOUS NATIONS. 355 

the senate of Hamburgh, with fifty thousand votaries, 
so penetrated by one universal sentiment, that this 
multitude preserved a mournful silence, and the inter- 
ference of the police ceased to be necessary through the 
city at the solemn burial of the man of genius. Has 
even Holland proved insensible ? The statue of Eras- 
mus, in Rotterdam, still animates her young students, 
and offers a noble example to her neighbours of the 
influence even of the sight of the statue of a man of 
genius. Travellers never fail to mention Erasmus 
when Basle occupies their recollections ; so that, as 
Bayle observes, " He has rendered the place of his 
death as celebrated as that of his birth." In France, 
since Francis I. created genius, and Louis XIY. pro- 
tected it, the impulse has been communicated to the 
French people. There the statues of their illustrious 
men spread inspiration on the spots which living they 
would have haunted : — in their theatres the -great dra- 
matists ; in their Institute their illustrious authors ; in 
their public edifices congenial men of genius*. This is 
worthy of the country which privileged the family of 
La Fontaine to be for ever exempt from taxes, and 
decreed that " the productions of the mind were not 
seizable," when the creditors of Crebillon would have 
attached the produce of his tragedies. 

These distinctive honours accorded to genius, were in 
unison with their decree respecting the will of Bayle. 
It was the subject of a lawsuit between the heir of the 

* We cannot bury the fame of our English worthies — that exists 
before us, independent of ourselves ; but we bury the influence of their 
inspiring presence in those immortal memorials of genius easy to be 
read by all men — their statues and their busts, consigning them to 
spots seldom visited, and often too obscure to be viewed. 
A a2 



356 LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE 

will and the inheritor by blood. The latter contested that 
this great literary character, being a fugitive for religion, 
and dying in a proscribed country, was divested by law 
of the power to dispose of his property, and that our 
author, when resident in Holland, in a civil sense was 
dead. In the parliament of Toulouse the judge decided 
that learned men are free in all countries ; that he who 
had sought in a foreign land an asylum from his love of 
letters, was no fugitive ; that it was unworthy of France 
to treat as a stranger a son in whom she gloried, and he 
protested against the notion of a civil death to such a 
man as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Eu- 
rope. This judicial decision in France was in unison 
with that of the senate of Rotterdam, who declared of 
the emigrant Bayle, that " Such a man should not be 
considered as a foreigner." 

Even the most common objects are consecrated when 
associated with the memory of the man of genius. 
We still seek for his tomb on the spot where it has 
vanished. The enthusiasts of genius still wander on 
the hills of Pausilippo, and muse on Virgil to retrace 
his landscape. There is a grove at Magdalen College 
which retains the name of Addison's walk, where still 
the student will linger ; and there is a cave at Macao, 
which is still visited by the Portuguese from a national 
feeling, for Camoens there passed many days in com- 
posing his Lusiad. When Petrarch was passing by 
his native town, he was received with the honours of 
his fame ; but when the heads of the town conducted 
Petrarch to the house where the poet was born, and 
informed him that the proprietor had often wished to 
make alterations, but that the towns-people had risen 



MEMORY OF THE MAN OF GENIUS. 357 

to insist that the house which was consecrated by the 
birth of Petrarch should be preserved unchanged ; this 
was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than his coro- 
nation at Rome*. 

In the village of Certaldo is still shown the house of 
Boccaccio ; and on a turret are seen the arms of the 
Medici, which they had sculptured there, with an in- 
scription alluding to a small house and a name which 
filled the world ; and in Ferrara, the small house which 
Ariosto built was purchased, to be preserved, by the 
municipality, and there they still show the poet's study ; 
and under his bust a simple but affecting tribute to 
genius records, that " Ludovico Ariosto in this apart- 
ment wrote." Two hundred and eighty years after the 
death of the divine poet, it was purchased and restored 
by the podesta, with the money of the commune, that 
" the public veneration may be maintained." " Fo- 
reigners," says Anthony Wood of Milton, " have, out 
of pure devotion, gone to Bread-street to see the house 
and chamber where he was born ;" and at Paris the 
house which Yoltaire inhabited, and at Ferney his 
study, are both preserved inviolate. In the study of 
Montesquieu at La Brede, near Bordeaux, the pro- 
prietor has preserved all the furniture, without altering 
anything, that the apartment where this great man 
meditated on his immortal work should want for nothing 
to assist the reveries of the spectator ; and on the side 

* On this passage I find a remarkable manuscript note by Lord 
Byron. 

" It would have pained me more that ' the proprietor ' should have 
' often ' wished to make alterations, tban it could give pleasure tbat 
the rest of Arezzo rose against bis right (for right he had) ; the de- 
preciation of tbe lowest of mankind is more painful than the applause 
of the highest is pleasing ; the sting of a scorpion is more in torture 
than the possession of anything could be in rapture." 



358 LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE 

of the chimney is still seen a place which while writing 
he was accustomed to rub his feet against, as they 
rested on it. In a keep or dungeon of this feudal cha- 
teau, the local association suggested to the philosopher 
his chapter on " The Liberty of the Citizen." It is 
the second chapter of the twelfth book, of which the 
close is remarkable. 

Let us regret that the little villa of Pope, and the 
poetic Leasowes of Shenstone, have fallen the victims 
of property as much as if destroyed by the barbarous 
hand which cut down the consecrated tree of Shak- 
speare. The very apartment of a man of genius, the 
chair he studied in, the table he wrote on, are con- 
templated with curiosity ; the spot is full of local im- 
pressions. And all this happens from an unsatisfied 
desire to see and hear him whom we never can see nor 
hear ; yet in a moment of illusion, if we listen to a 
traditional conversation, if we can revive one of his 
feelings, if we can catch but a dim image, we reproduce 
this man of genius before us, on whose features we so 
often dwell. Even the rage of the military spirit has 
taught itself to respect the abode of genius ; and Caesar 
and Sylla, who never spared the blood of their own 
Rome, alike felt their spirit rebuked, and alike saved 
the literary city of Athens. Antiquity has preserved 
a beautiful incident of this nature, in the noble reply 
of the artist Protogenes. When the city of Rhodes 
was taken by Demetrius, the man of genius was dis- 
covered in his garden, tranquilly finishing a picture. 
" How is it that you do not participate in the general 
alarm ? " asked the conqueror. " Demetrius, you war 
against the Rhodians, but not against the fine arts," 
replied the man of genius. Demetrius had already 



MEMORY OF THE MAN OF GENIUS. 359 

shown this by his conduct, for he forbade firing that 
part of the city where the artist resided. 

The house of the man of genius has been spared 
amidst contending empires, from the days of Pindar to 
those of Buffon ; " the Historian of Nature's " chateau 
was preserved from this elevated feeling by Prince 
Schwartzenberg, as our Marlborough had performed 
the same glorious office in guarding the hallowed asylum 
of Fe.velon. In the grandeur of Milton's verse we 
perceive the feeling he associated with this literary 
honour — 

" The great Emathian conqueror bid spare 

The house of Pindarus when temple and tower 
Went to the ground ■ ." 

And the meanest things, the very household stuff, 
associated with the memory of the man of genius, 
become the objects of our affections. At a, festival 
in honour of Thomson the poet, the chair in which 
he composed part of his Seasons was produced, and 
appears to have communicated some of the raptures 
to which he was liable who had sat in that chair. 
Rabelais, amongst his drollest inventions, could not 
have imagined that his old cloak would have been 
preserved in the university of Montpelier for future 
doctors to wear on the day they took their degree ; 
nor could Shakspeare have supposed, with all his 
fancy, that the mulberry-tree which he planted would 
have been multiplied into relics. But in such in- 
stances the feeling is right, with a wrong direction ; 
and while the populace are exhausting their emotions 
on an old tree, an old chair, and an old cloak, they are 
paying that involuntary tribute to genius which forms 
its pride, and will generate the race. 



360 INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS ON SOCIETY. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

Influence of Authors on society, and of society on Authors. — National 
tastes a source of literary prejudices. — True Genius always the organ 
of its nation. — Master- writers preserve the distinct national character. 
Genius the organ of the state of the age. — Causes of its suppression 
in a people. — Often invented, but neglected. — The naturd grada- 
tions of genius. — Men of Genius produce their usefulness in privacy. 
— The public mind is now the creation of the public writer. — Poli- 
ticians affect to deny this principle. — Authors stand between the 
governors and the governed. — A view of the solitary Author in his 
study. — They create an epoch in history. — Influence of popular 
Authors. — The immortality of thought. — The Family of Genius 
illustrated by their genealogy. 

Literary fame, which is the sole preserver of all 
other fame, participates little, and remotely, in the 
remuneration and the honours of professional characters. 
All other professions press more immediately on the 
wants and attentions of men, than the occupations of 
Literary Characters, who from their habits are 
secluded ; producing their usefulness often at a late 
period of life, and not always valued by their own 
generation. 

It is not the commercial character of a nation which 
inspires veneration in mankind, nor will its military 
power engage the affections of its neighbours. So late 
as in 1700, the Italian Gemelli told all Europe that he 
could find nothing among us but our writings to distin- 
guish us from a people of barbarians. It was long con- 
sidered that our genius partook of the density and 
variableness of our climate, and that we were incapaci- 



NATIONAL TASTES. 36 1 

tated even by situation from the enjoyments of those 
beautiful arts which had not yet travelled to us, — as if 
Nature herself had designed to disjoin us from more 
polished nations and brighter skies. 

At length we have triumphed! Our philosophers, 
our poets, and our historians, are printed at foreign 
presses. This is a perpetual victory, and establishes 
the ascendancy of our genius, as much at least as the 
commerce and the prowess of England. This singular 
revolution in the history of the human mind, and by its 
reaction, this singular revolution in human affairs, was 
effected by a glorious succession of authors, who have 
enabled our nation to arbitrate among the nations of 
Europe, and to possess ourselves of their involuntary 
esteem by discoveries in science, by principles in phi- 
losophy, by truths in history, and even by the graces 
of fiction ; and there is not a man of genius among 
foreigners who stands unconnected with our intellectual 
sovereignty. Even had our country displayed more 
limited resources than its awful powers have opened, 
and had the sphere of its dominion been closed by its 
island boundaries, if the same national literary character 
had predominated, we should have stood on the same 
eminence among our continental rivals. The small 
cities of Athens and of Florence will perpetually attest 
the influence of the literary character over other nations. 
The one received the tribute of the mistress of the uni- 
verse, when the Romans sent their youth to be educated 
at the Grecian city, while the other, at the revival of 
letters, beheld every polished European crowding to its 
little court. 

In closing this imperfect work by attempting to 



362 LITERARY PREJUDICES. 






ascertain the real influence of authors on society, it will 
be necessary to notice some curious facts in the history 
of genius. 

The distinct literary tastes of different nations, and 
the repugnance they mutually betray for the master- 
writers of each other, is an important circumstance to 
the philosophical observer. These national tastes origi- 
nate in modes of feeling, in customs, in idioms, and all 
the numerous associations prevalent among every people. 
The reciprocal influence of manners on taste, and of taste 
on manners, of government and religion on the litera- 
ture of a people, and of their literature on the national 
character, with other congenial objects of inquiry, still 
require a more ample investigation. Whoever attempts 
to reduce this diversity, and these strong contrasts of 
national tastes, to one common standard, by forcing such 
dissimilar objects into comparative parallels, or by try- 
ing them by conventional principles and arbitrary regu- 
lations, will often condemn what in truth his mind is 
inadequate to comprehend, and the experience of his 
associations to combine. 

These attempts have been the fertile source in litera- 
ture of what may be called national prejudices. The 
French nation insists that the northerns are defective in 
taste — the taste, they tell us, which is established at 
Paris, and which existed at Athens : the Gothic imagi- 
nation of the north spurns at the timid copiers of the 
Latin classics, and interminable disputes prevail in their 
literature, as in their architecture and their painting. 
Philosophy discovers a fact of which taste seems little 
conscious ; it is, that genius varies with the soil, and 
produces a nationality of taste. The feelings of man- 



POWER OF TRUE GENIUS. 363 

kind indeed have the same common source, but they 
must come to us through the medium and by the modi- 
fications of society. Love is an universal passion, but 
the poetry of love in different nations is peculiar to each ; 
for every great poet belongs to his country. Petrarch, 
Lope de Vega, Racine, Shakespeare, and Sadi, would 
each express this universal passion by the most specific 
differences ; and the style that would be condemned as 
unnatural by one people, might be habitual with another. 
The concetti of the Italian, the figurative style of the 
Persian, the swelling grandeur of the Spaniard, the 
classical correctness of the French, are all modifications 
of genius, relatively true to each particular writer. On 
national tastes critics are but wrestlers : the Spaniard 
will still prefer his Lope de Vega to the French Racine, 
or the English his Shakspeare, as the Italian his Tasso 
and his Petrarch. Hence all national writers are studied 
with enthusiasm by their own people, and their very 
peculiarities, offensive to others, with the natives con- 
stitute their excellences. Nor does this perpetual con- 
test about the great writers of other nations solely arise 
from an association of patriotic glory, but really because 
these great native writers have most strongly excited 
the sympathies and conformed to the habitual tastes of 
their own people. 

Hence then we deduce that true genius is the organ of 
its nation. The creative faculty is itself created ; for it 
is the nation which first imparts an impulse to the 
character of genius. Such is the real source of those 
distinct tastes which we perceive in all great national 
authors. Every literary work, to ensure its success, 
must adapt itself to the sympathies and the under- 



364 GENIUS THE ORGAN OF 

standings of the people it addresses. Hence those oppo- 
site characteristics which are usually ascribed to the 
master-writers themselves, originate with the country, 
and not with the writer. Lope de Vega and Calderon 
in their dramas, and Cervantes, who has left his 
name as the epithet of a peculiar grave humour, were 
Spaniards before they were men of genius. Corneille, 
Racine, and Rabelais, are entirely of an opposite cha- 
racter to the Spaniards, having adapted their genius to 
their own declamatory and vivacious countrymen. Pe- 
trarch and Tasso display a fancifulness in depicting 
the passions, as Boccaccio narrates his facetious stories, 
quite distinct from the inventions and style of northern 
writers. Shakspeare is placed at a wider interval 
from all of them than they are from each other, and is 
as perfectly insular in his genius, as his own countrymen 
were in their customs, and their modes of thinking and 
feeling. 

Thus the master-writers of every people preserve the 
distinct national character in their works ; and hence 
that extraordinary enthusiasm with which every people 
read their own favourite authors ; but in which others 
cannot participate, and for which, with all their national 
prejudices, they often recriminate on each other with 
false, and even ludicrous criticism. 

But genius is not only the organ of its nation ; it is 
also that of the state of the times, and a great work 
usually originates in the age. Certain events must pre- 
cede the man of genius, who often becomes only the 
vehicle of public feeling. Machiavel has been re- 
proached for propagating a political system subversive 
of all human honour and happiness ; but was it Ma- 



THE STATE OF THE AGE. 365 

chiavel who formed his age, or the age which created 
Machiavel ? Living among the petty principalities of 
Italy, where stratagem and assassination were the prac- 
tices of those wretched courts, what did that calumniated 
genius more than lift the veil from a cabinet of banditti ; 
Machiavel alarmed the world by exposing a system 
subversive of all human virtue and happiness, and 
whether he meant it or not, certainly led the way to 
political freedom. On the same principle we may learn 
that Boccaccio would not have written so many in- 
decent tales, had not the scandalous lives of the monks 
engaged public attention. This we may now regret ; 
but the court of Rome felt the concealed satire, and that 
luxurious and numerous class in society never recovered 
from the chastisement. 

Montaigne has been censured for his universal scep- 
ticism, and for the unsettled notions he threw out on his 
motley page, which has been attributed to his incapacity 
of forming decisive opinions. " Que scais-je V was his 
motto. The same accusation may reach the gentle 
Erasmus, who alike offended the old catholics and the 
new reformers. The real source of their vacillations we 
may discover in the age itself. It was one of contro- 
versy and of civil wars, when the minds of men were 
thrown into perpetual agitation, and opinions, like the 
victories of the parties, were every day changing sides. 

Even in its advancement beyond the intelligence of 
its own age, genius is but progressive. In nature all is 
continuous ; she makes no starts and leaps. Genius is 
said to soar, but we should rather say that genius 
climbs. Did the great Verulam, or Rawleigh, or Dr. 
More, emancipate themselves from all the dreams of 



366 CAUSES OF THE SUPPRESSION OF 

their age, from the occult agency of witchcraft, the 
astral influence, and the ghost and demon creed ? 

Before a particular man of genius can appear, certain 
events must arise to prepare the age for him. A great 
commercial nation, in the maturity of time, opened all 
the ^sources of wealth to the contemplation of Adam 
Smith. That extensive system of what is called poli- 
tical economy, could not have been produced at any 
other time ; for before this period the materials of this 
work had but an imperfect existence, and the advances 
which this sort of science had made were only partial 
and preparatory. If the principle of Adam Smith's 
great work seems to confound the happiness of a nation 
with its wealth, we can scarcely reproach the man of 
genius, who we shall find is always reflecting back the 
feelings of his own nation, even in his most original 
speculations. 

In works of pure imagination we trace the same 
march of the human intellect; and we discover in those 
inventions, which appear sealed by their originality, 
how much has been derived from the age and the people 
in which they were produced. Every work of genius 
is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the 
events of the times. The Inferno of Dante was caught 
from the popular superstitions of the age, and had been 
preceded by the gross visions which the monks had 
forged, usually for their own purposes. " La Citta 
dolente," and " la perduta gente," w T ere familiar to the 
imaginations of the people, by the monkish visions, and 
it seems even by ocular illusions of Hell, exhibited in 
mysteries, with its gulfs of flame, and its mountains of 
ice, and the shrieks of the condemned. To produce the 



GENIUS IN A PEOPLE. 367 

" Inferno" only required the giant step of genius, in 
the sombre, the awful, and the fierce Dante. When 
the age of chivalry flourished, all breathed of love and 
courtesy ; the great man was the great lover, and the 
great author the romancer. It was from his own age 
that Milton derived his greatest blemish, — the intro- 
duction of school-divinity into poetry. In a polemical 
age the poet, as well as the sovereign, reflected the 
reigning tastes. 

There are accidents to which genius is liable, and by 
which it is frequently suppressed in a people. The 
establishment of the Inquisition in Spain at one stroke 
annihilated all the genius of the country. Cervantes 
said that the Inquisition had spoilt many of his most 
delightful inventions ; and unquestionably it silenced 
the wit and invention of a nation whose proverbs attest 
they possessed them even to luxuriance. All the conti- 
nental nations have boasted great native painters and 
architects, while these arts were long truly foreign to 
us. Theoretical critics, at a loss to account for this 
singularity, accused not only our climate, but even our 
diet, as the occult causes of our unfitness to cultivate 
them. Yet Montesquieu and Winkelman might have 
observed, that the air of fens and marshes had not 
deprived the gross feeders of Holland and Flanders of 
admirable artists. We have been outrageously calum- 
niated. So far from any national incapacity, or obtuse 
feelings attaching to ourselves in respect to these arts, 
the noblest efforts had long been made, not only by 
individuals, but by the magnificence of Henry VIII., 
who invited to his court Raphael and Titian, but unfor- 
tunately only obtained Holbein. A later sovereign, 



368 WORKS OF GENIUS 

Charles the First, not only possessed galleries of pictures, 
and was the greatest purchaser in Europe, for he raised 
their value, but he likewise possessed the taste and the 
science of the connoisseur. Something, indeed, had 
occurred to our national genius which had thrown it 
into a stupifying state, from which it is yet hardly 
aroused. Could those foreign philosophers have ascended 
to moral causes, instead of vapouring forth fanciful no- 
tions, they might have struck at the true cause of the 
deficiency in our national genius. The jealousy of puri- 
tanic fanaticism had persecuted these arts from the first 
rise of the Reformation in this country. It had not 
only banished them from our cl^urches and altar-pieces, 
but the fury of the people, and the " wisdom" of par- 
liament, had alike combined to mutilate and even efface 
what little remained of painting and sculpture among 
us. Even within our own times this deadly hostility 
to art was not extinct ; for when a proposal was made 
gratuitously to decorate our places of worship by a 
series of religious pictures, and English artists, in pure 
devotion to Art, zealous to refute the continental calum- 
niators, asked only for walls to cover, George the Third 
highly approved of the plan. The design was put aside, 
as some had a notion that the cultivation of the fine 
arts in our naked churches was a return to Catholicism. 
Had this glorious plan been realised, the golden age of 
English art might have arisen. Every artist would 
have invented a subject most congenial to his powers. 
Reynolds would have emulated Raphael in the Virgin 
and Child in the manger, West had fixed on Christ 
. raising the young man from the dead, Barry had pro- 
foundly*meditated on the Jews rejecting Jesus. Thus 



OFTEN INVENTED, BUT NEGLECTED. 369 

did an age of genius perish before its birth ! It was on 
the occasion of this frustrated project that Barry, in 
the rage of disappointment, immortalised himself by a 
gratuitous labour of seven years on the walls of the 
Society of Arts, for which, it is said, the French govern- 
ment under Buonaparte offered ten thousand pounds. 

Thus also it has happened, that we have possessed 
among ourselves great architects, although opportunities 
for displaying their genius have been rare. This the 
fate and fortune of two Englishmen attest. Without 
the fire of London, we might not have shown the world 
one of the greatest architects, in Sir Christopher 
Wren; had not a St. Paul's been required by the 
nation, he would have found no opportunity of display- 
ing the magnificence of his genius, which even then was 
mutilated, as the original model bears witness to the 
world. That great occasion served this noble architect 
to multiply his powers in other public edifices : and it 
is here worth remarking, that had not Charles II. been 
seized by apoplexy, the royal residence which was begun 
at Winchester on a plan of Sir Christopher Wren's, by 
its magnificence would have raised a Versailles for 
England. 

The fate of Inigo Jones is as remarkable as that of 
Wren. Whitehall afforded a proof to foreigners, that 
among a people which, before that edifice appeared, 
was reproached for their total deficiency of feeling for 
the pure classical style of architecture, the true taste 
could nevertheless exist. This celebrated piece of archi- 
tecture, however, is but a fragment of a grander compo- 
sition, by which, had not the civil wars intervened, the 
fame of Britain would have balanced the glory of Greece, 

B B 



370 NATURAL GRADATION OP GENIUS. 

or Italy, or France, and would have shown that our 
country is more deficient in marble than in genius. 
Thus the fire of London produces a St. Paul's, and the 
civil wars suppress a Whitehall. Such circumstances 
in the history of art among nations have not always 
been developed by those theorists who have calumniated 
the artists of England. 

In the history of genius it is remarkable, that its 
work is often invented, and lies neglected. A close 
observer of this age pointed out to me, that the military 
genius of that great French captain who so long 
appeared to have conquered Europe, was derived from 
his applying the new principles of war discovered by 
Folard and Guibert. The genius of Folard observed, 
that among the changes of military discipline in the 
practice of war among European nations since the 
introduction of gunpowder, one of the ancient methods 
of the Romans had been improperly neglected, and in 
his Commentaries on Polybius, Folard revived this 
forgotten mode of warfare. Guibert, in his great 
work " Histoire de la Milice Francaise," or rather the 
History of the Art of War, adopted Folard's system of 
charging by columns, and breaking the centre of the 
enemy, which seems to be the famous plan of our Rodney 
and Nelson in their maritime battles. But this favourite 
plan became the ridicule of the military ; and the bold- 
ness of his pen, with the high confidence of the author, 
only excited adversaries to mortify his pretensions, 
and to treat him as a dreamer. From this perpetual 
opposition to his plans, and the neglect he incurred, 
Guibert died of "vexation of spirit;" and the last 
words on the death-bed of this man of genius were, 



NATURAL GRADATION OF GENIUS. 371 

" One day they will know me ! " Folard and Guibert 
created a Buonaparte, who studied them on the field 
of battle; and he who would trace the military genius 
who so long held in suspense the fate of the world, may 
discover all that he performed in the neglected inventions 
of preceding genius. 

Hence also we may deduce the natural gradations of 
genius. Many men of genius must arise before a parti- 
cular man of genius can appear. Before Homer there 
were other epic poets ; a catalogue of their names and 
their works has come down to us. Corneille could 
not have been the chief dramatist of France, had not 
the founders of the French drama preceded him, and 
Pope could not have preceded Dryden. It was in the 
nature of things that a Giotto and a Cimabue should 
have preceded a Raphael and a Michael Angelo. 

Even the writings of such extravagant geniuses as 
Bruno and Cardan, gave indications of the progress 
of the human mind ; and had Ramus not shaken the 
authority of the Organon of Aristotle, we might not 
have had the Novum Organon of Bacon. Men slide 
into their degree in the scale of genius, often by the 
exercise of a single quality which their predecessors did 
not possess, or by completing what at first was left 
imperfect. Truth is a single point in knowledge, as 
beauty is in art ; ages revolve till a Newton and a 
Locke accomplish what an Aristotle and a Descartes 
began. The old theory of animal spirits, observes 
Professor Dugald Stewart, was applied by Descartes 
to explain the mental phenomena, which led Newton 
into that train of thinking which served as the ground- 
work of Hartley's theory of vibrations. The learning 
bb2 



372 MEN OF GENIUS PRODUCE THEIR 

of one man makes others learned, and the influence of 
genius is in nothing more remarkable than in its effects 
on its brothers. Selden's treatise on the Syrian and Ara- 
bian Deities enabled Milton to comprise in one hundred 
and thirty beautiful lines, the two large and learned 
syntagma which Selden had composed on that abstract 
subject. Leland, the father of British antiquities, 
impelled Stowe to work on his "Survey of London;" 
and Stowe's " London " inspired Camden's stupendous 
" Britannia." Herodotus produced Thucydides, and 
Thucydides Xenophon. With us Hume, Robertson, 
and Gibbon rose almost simultaneously by mutual in- 
spiration. There exists a perpetual action and reaction 
in the history of the human mind. It has frequently 
been inquired why certain periods seem to have been 
more favourable to a particular class of genius than 
another ; or in other words, why men of genius appear 
in clusters. We have theories respecting barren periods, 
which are only satisfactorily accounted for by moral 
causes. Genius generates enthusiasm and rivalry; but 
having reached the meridian of its class, we find that 
there can be no progress in the limited perfection of 
human nature. All excellence in art, if it cannot 
advance, must decline. 

Important discoveries are often obtained by accident; 
but the single work of a man of genius, which has at 
length changed the character of a people, and even of 
an age, is slowly matured in meditation. Even the 
mechanical inventions of genius must first become 
perfect in its own solitary abode ere the world can 
possess them. Men of genius then produce their use- 
fulness in privacy ; but it may not be of immediate 



USEFULNESS IN PRIVACY. 373 

application, and is often undervalued by their own 
generation. 

The influence of authors is so great, while the author 
himself is so inconsiderable, that to some the cause may 
not appear commensurate to its effect. When Epicurus 
published his doctrines, men immediately began to 
express themselves with freedom on the established 
religion, and the dark and fearful superstitions of 
paganism, falling into neglect, mouldered away. If, 
then, before the art of multiplying the productions of 
the human mind existed, the doctrines of a philosopher 
in manuscript or by lecture, could diffuse themselves 
throughout a literary nation, it will baffle the algebraist 
of metaphysics to calculate the unknown quantities of 
the propagation of human thought. There are problems 
in metaphysics, as well as in mathematics, which can 
never be resolved. 

A small portion of mankind appears marked out by 
nature and by study for the purpose of cultivating their 
thoughts in peace, and of giving activity to their dis- 
coveries, by disclosing them to the people. " Could I," 
exclaims Montesquieu, whose heart was beating with 
the feelings of a great author, " could I but afford new 
reasons to men to love their duties, their king, their 
country, their laws, that they might become more 
sensible of their happiness under every government they 
live, and in every station they occupy, I should deem 
myself the happiest of men ! " Such was the pure aspi- 
ration of the great author who studied to preserve, by 
ameliorating the humane fabric of society. The same 
largeness of mind characterises all the eloquent friends 
of the human race. In an age of religious intolerance 



374 THE PUBLIC MIND IS THE 

it inspired the President De Thou to inculcate, from 
sad experience and a juster view of human nature, the 
impolicy as well as the inhumanity of religious perse- 
cutions, in that dedication to Henry IV. which Lord 
Mansfield declared he could never read without rapture, 
" I was not born for myself alone, but for my country 
and my friends!" exclaimed the genius which hallowed 
the virtuous pages of his immortal history. 

Even our liberal yet dispassionate Locke restrained 
the freedom of his inquiries, and corrected the errors 
which the highest intellect may fall into, by marking 
out that impassable boundary which must probably 
for ever limit all human intelligence ; for the maxim 
which Locke constantly inculcates is, that "Reason 
must be the last judge and guide in everything." A 
final answer to those who propagate their opinions, 
whatever they may be, with a sectarian spirit, to force 
the understandings of other men to their own modes of 
belief, and their own variable opinions. This alike in- 
cludes those who yield up nothing to the genius of their 
age to correct the imperfections of society, and those 
who, opposing all human experience, would annihilate 
what is most admirable in its institutions. 

The public mind is the creation of the Master- 
Writers ; an axiom as demonstrable as any in Euclid, 
and a principle as sure in its operation as any in 
mechanics. Bacon's influence over philosophy and 
Grotius's over the political state of society are still 
felt, and their principles practised far more than in their 
own age. These men of genius in their solitude, 
and with their views not always comprehended by their 
contemporaries, became themselves the founders of our 



CREATION OF MASTER- WRITERS. 375 

science and our legislation. When Locke and Mon- 
tesquieu appeared, the old systems of government were 
reviewed ; ' the principle of toleration was developed ; 
and the revolutions of opinion were discovered. 

A noble thought of Yitruvius, who of all the authors 
of antiquity seems to have been most deeply imbued 
with the feelings of the literary character, has often 
struck me by the grandeur and the truth of its concep- 
tion. " The sentiments of excellent writers," he says, 
" although their persons be for ever absent, exist in 
future ages ; and in councils and debates are of greater 
authority than those of the persons who are present." 

But politicians affect to disbelieve that abstract 
principles possess any considerable influence on the 
conduct of the subject. They tell us, that " in times 
of tranquillity they are not wanted, and in times of 
confusion they are never heard:" this is the philosophy 
of men who do not choose that philosophy should disturb 
their fire-side ! But it is in leisure, when they are not 
wanted, that the speculative part of mankind create 
them, and when they are wanted, they are already 
prepared for the active multitude, who come like a 
phalanx, pressing each other with a unity of feeling, 
and an integrity of force. Paley would not close his 
eyes on what was passing before him ; for he has 
observed, that during the convulsions at Geneva, the 
political theory of Rousseau was prevalent in their 
contests ; while in the political disputes of our country, 
the ideas of civil authority displayed in the works of 
Locke, recurred in every form. The character of a 
great author can never be considered as subordinate in 
society; nor do politicians secretly think so at the 



376 AUTHORS STAND BETWEEN THE 

moment they are proclaiming it to the world, for on 
the contrary, they consider the worst actions of men as 
of far less consequence than the propagation of their 
opinions. Politicians have exposed their disguised 
terrors. Books, as well as their authors, have been 
tried and condemned. Cromwell was alarmed when he 
saw the Oceana of Harrington, and dreaded the effects 
of that volume more than the plots of the royalists ; 
while Charles II. trembled at an author only in his 
manuscript state, and in the height of terror, and to the 
honour of genius it was decreed, that "Scribere est 
agere." — " The book of Telemachus," says Madame de 
Stael, " was a courageous action." To insist with such 
ardour on the duties of a sovereign, and to paint with 
such truth a voluptuous reign, disgraced Fenelon at 
the court of Louis XIV., but the virtuous author raised 
a statue for himself in all hearts. Massillon's Petit 
Careme was another of these animated recalls of man 
to the sympathies of his nature, which proves the influ- 
ence of an author ; for during the contests of Louis XV. 
with the parliaments, large editions of this book were 
repeatedly printed, and circulated through the kingdom. 
In such moments it is that a people find and know the 
value of a great author, whose work is the mighty 
organ which conveys their voice to their governors. 

But if the influence of benevolent authors over society 
is great, it must not be forgotten that the abuse of 
this influence is terrific. Authors preside at a tribunal 
in Europe, which is independent of all the powers of 
the earth, — the tribunal of Opinion ! But since, as 
Sophocles has long declared, " Opinion is stronger than 
Truth," it is unquestionable, that the falsest and the 



GOVERNORS AND THE GOVERNED. 377 

most depraved notions are, as long as these opinions, 
maintain their force, accepted as immutable truths; 
and the mistakes of one man become the crimes of a 
whole people. 

Authors stand between the governors and the governed, 
and form the single organ of both. Those who govern 
a nation cannot at the same time enlighten the people, 
for the executive power is not empirical ; and the 
governed cannot think, for they have no continuity of 
leisure. The great systems of thought, and the great 
discoveries in moral and political philosophy, have come 
from the solitude of contemplative men, seldom occupied 
in public affairs or in private employments. The com- 
mercial world owes to two retired philosophers, Locke 
and Smith, those principles which dignify trade into a 
liberal pursuit, and connect it with the happiness and 
the glory of a people. A work in France, under the title 
of " L' Ami des Hommes," by the Marquis of Mirabeau, 
first spread there a general passion for agricultural 
pursuits ; and although the national ardour carried all 
to excess in the reveries of the " Economistes," yet marshes 
were drained and waste lands inclosed. The Emilius 
of Rousseau, whatever may be its errors and extrava- 
gancies, operated a complete revolution in modern 
Europe, by communicating a bolder spirit to education, 
and improving the physical force and character of man. 
An Italian marquis, whose birth and habits seemed little 
favourable to study, operated a moral revolution in the 
administration of the laws. Beccaria dared to plead 
in favour of humanity against the prejudices of many 
centuries, in his small volume on " Crimes and Punish- 
ments," and at length abolished torture ; while the 



378 THE SOLITARY AUTHOR IN HIS STUDY. 

French advocates drew their principles from that book, 
rather than from their national code, and our Blackstone 
quoted it with admiration ! Locke and Voltaire 
having written on " Toleration," have long made us 
tolerant. In all such cases, the authors were themselves 
entirely unconnected with their subjects, except as 
speculative writers. 

Such are the authors who become universal in public 
opinion ; and it then happens that the work itself meets 
with the singular fate, which that great genius Smeaton 
said happened to his stupendous Pharos : " the novelty 
having yearly worn off, and the greatest real praise of 
the edifice being that nothing has happened to it, nothing 
has occurred to keep the talk of it alive." The funda- 
mental principles of such works, after having long 
entered into our earliest instruction, become unquestion- 
able as self-evident propositions ; yet, no one perhaps 
at this day, can rightly conceive the great merits of 
Locke's Treatises on " Education," and on " Toleration," 
or the philosophical spirit of Montesquieu, and works 
of this high order, which first diffused a tone of thinking- 
over Europe. The principles have become so incorpo- 
rated with our judgment, and so interwoven with our 
feelings, that we can hardly now imagine the fervour 
they excited at the time, or the magnanimity of their 
authors in the decision of their opinions. Every first 
great monument of genius raises a new standard to our 
knowledge, from which the human mind takes its 
impulse and measures its advancement. The march of 
human thought, through ages, might be indicated by 
every great work, as it is progressively succeeded by 
others. It stands like the golden milliary column in 



CREATES AN EPOCH IN HISTORY. 379 

the midst of Rome, from which all others reckoned their 
distances. 

But a scene of less grandeur, yet more beautiful, is 
the view of the solitary author himself in his own study 
— so deeply occupied, that whatever passes before him 
never reaches his observation, while working more than 
twelve hours every day, he still murmurs as the hour 
strikes; the volume still lies open, the page still impor- 
tunes — " And whence all this business?" He has made 
a discovery for us ! that never has there been anything 
important in the active world, but what is reflected in 
the literary — books contain everything, even the false- 
hoods and the crimes which have been only projected 
by men ! This solitary man of genius is arranging the 
materials of instruction and curiosity from every country, 
and every age ; he is striking out, in the concussion of 
new light, a new order of ideas for his own times ; he 
possesses secrets which men hide from their contempo- 
raries, truths they dared not utter, facts they dared not 
discover. View him in the stillness of meditation, his 
eager spirit busied over a copious page, and his eye 
sparkling with gladness. He has concluded what his 
countrymen will hereafter cherish as the legacy of 
genius — y oil see him now changed; and the restlessness 
of his soul is thrown into his very gestures — could you 
listen to the vaccinator ! But the next age only will quote 
his predictions. If he be the truly great author, he will 
be best comprehended by posterity, for the result of ten 
years of solitary meditation has often required a whole 
century to be understood and to be adopted. The ideas of 
Bishop Berkeley, in his " Theory of Vision," were 
condemned as a philosophical romance, and now form 



380 INFLUENCE OF POPULAR AUTHORS. 

an essential part of every treatise of optics ; and " the 
History of Oracles," by Fontenelle, says La Harpe, 
which in his youth was censured for its impiety, the 
centenarian lived to see regarded as a proof of his respect 
for religion. 

" But what influence can this solitary man, this author 
of genius, have on his nation, when he has none in the 
very street in which he lives? and it may be suspected 
as little in his own house ; whose inmates are hourly 
practising on the infantine simplicity which marks his 
character, and that frequent abstraction from what is 
passing under his own eyes?'*' 

This solitary man of genius is stamping his own 
character on the minds of his own people. Take one 
instance, from others far more splendid, in the contrast 
presented by Franklin and Sir William Jones. The 
parsimonious habits, the money-getting precepts, the 
wary cunning, the little scruple about means, the fixed 
intent upon the end, of Dr. Franklin, imprinted them- 
selves on his Americans. Loftier feelings could not 
elevate a man of genius, who became the founder of a 
trading people, and who retained the early habits of a 
journeyman ; while the elegant tastes of Sir William 
Jones could inspire the servants of a commercial corpo- 
ration to open new and vast sources of knowledge. A 
mere company of merchants, influenced by the literary 
character, enlarges the stores of the imagination, and 
provides fresh materials for the history of human 
nature. 

Franklin, with that calm good sense which is freed 
from the passion of imagination, has himself declared 
this important truth relating to the literary character. 



INFLUENCE OF POPULAR AUTHORS. 381 

" I have always thought that one man of tolerable 
abilities may work great changes and accomplish great 
affairs among mankind, if he first forms a good plan ; 
and cutting off all amusements or other employments 
that would divert his attention, makes the execution of 
that same plan his sole study and business." Fontenelle 
was of the same opinion, for he remarks, that "a single 
great man is sufficient to accomplish a change in the 
taste of his age." The life of Granville Sharp is a 
striking illustration of the solitary force of individual 
character. 

It cannot be doubted that the great author, in the 
solitude of his study, has often created an epoch in the 
annals of mankind. A single man of genius arose in a 
barbarous period in Italy, who gave birth not only to 
Italian, but to European literature. Poet, orator, phi- 
losopher, geographer, historian, and antiquary, Pe- 
trarch kindled a line of light through his native land, 
while a crowd of followers hailed their father-genius, 
who had stamped his character on the age. Descartes, 
it has been observed, accomplished a .change in the 
taste of his age by the perspicacity and method, for 
which he was indebted to his mathematical researches ; 
and " models of metaphysical analysis and logical dis- 
cussions " in the works of Hume and Smith have had 
the same influence in the writings of our own time. 

Even genius not of the same colossal size may aspire 
to add to the progressive mass of human improvement 
by its own single effort. When an author writes on a 
national subject, he awakens all the knowledge which 
slumbers in a nation, and calls around him, as it were, 
every man of talents ; and though his own fame may 



382 INFLUENCE OF POPULAR AUTHORS. 

be eclipsed by his successors, yet the emanation, the 
morning light, broke from his solitary study. Our 
naturalist Ray, though no man was more modest in his 
claims, delighted to tell a friend, that " Since the publi- 
cation of his catalogue of Cambridge plants, many were 
prompted to botanical studies, and to herbalise in their 
walks in the fields." Johnson has observed, that " An 
emulation of study was raised by Cheke and Smith, to 
which even the present age perhaps owes many advan- 
tages, without remembering or knowing its benefactors." 
Rollin is only a compiler of history, and to the anti- 
quary he is nothing ! But races yet unborn will be 
enchanted by that excellent man, in whose works " the 
heart speaks to the heart," and whom Montesquieu 
called " The Bee of France." The Bacons, the New- 
tons, and the Leibnitzes were insulated by their own 
creative powers, and stood apart from the world, till 
the dispersers of knowledge became their interpreters to 
the people, opening a communication between two 
spots, which, though close to each other, were long 
separated — the closet and the world ! The Addisons, 
the Fontenelles, and the Feyjoos, the first popular 
authors in their nations, who taught England, France, 
and Spain, to become a reading people, while their fugi- 
tive page imbues with intellectual sweetness every 
uncultivated mind, like the perfumed mould taken up 
by the Persian swimmer. " It was but a piece of common 
earth, but so delicate was its fragrance, that he who 
found it, in astonishment asked whether it were musk 
or amber ? 'I am nothing but earth ; but roses were 
planted in my soil, and their odorous virtues have deli- 
ciously penetrated through all my pores : I have retained 



INFLUENCE OF POPULAR AUTHORS. 383 

the infusion of sweetness, otherwise I had been but a 
lump of earth !' " 

I have said that authors produce their usefulness in 
privacy, and that their good is not of immediate appli- 
cation, and often unvalued by their own generation. 
On this occasion the name of Evelyn always occurs to 
me. This author supplied the public with nearly thirty 
works, at a time when taste and curiosity were not yet 
domiciliated in our country; his patriotism warmed 
beyond the eightieth year of his age, and in his dying 
hand he held another legacy for his nation. Evelyn 
conveys a pleasing idea of his own works and their 
design. He first taught his countrymen how to plant, 
then to build : and having taught them to be useful 
without doors, he then attempted to divert and occupy 
them within doors, by his treatises on chalcography, 
painting, medals, libraries. It was during the days of 
destruction and devastation both of woods and buildings, 
the civil wars of Charles the First, that a solitary author 
was projecting to make the nation delight in repairing 
their evil, by inspiring them with the love of agriculture 
and architecture. Whether his enthusiasm was intro- 
ducing to us a taste for medals and prints, or intent on 
purifying the city from smoke and nuisances, and 
sweetening it by plantations of native plants, after 
having enriched our orchards and our gardens, placed 
summer-ices on our tables, and varied even the salads of 
our country ; furnishing " a Gardener's Kalendar/' 
which, as Cowley said, was to last as long " as months 
and years;" whether the philosopher of the Royal 
Society, or the lighter satirist of the toilette, or the fine 
moralist for active as well as contemplative life — in all 



384 INFLUENCE OF POPULAR AUTHORS. 

these changes of a studious life, the better part of his 
history has not yet been told. "While Britain retains 
her awful situation among the nations of Europe, the 
" Sylva" of Evelyn will endure with her triumphant 
oaks. In the third edition of that work the heart of 
the patriot expands at its result : he tells Charles II. 
" how many millions of timber trees, besides infinite 
others, have been propagated and planted at the insti- 
gation^ and by the sole direction of this work." It was 
an author in his studious retreat, who casting a pro- 
phetic eye on the age we live in, secured the late 
victories of our naval sovereignty. Inquire at the 
Admiralty how the fleets of Nelson have been cr in- 
structed, and they can tell you that it was with the 
oaks which the genius of Evelyn planted *. 

The same character existed in France, where De" 
Serres in 1599 composed a work on the cultivation of 
mulberry trees, in reference to the art of raising silk- 
worms. He taught his fellow-citizens to convert a leaf 
into silk, and silk to become the representative of gold. 
Our author encountered the hostility of the prejudices 
of his times, even from Sully, in giving his country one 
of her staple commodities ; but I lately received a medal 
recently struck in honour of De Serres by the Agri- 
cultural Society of the Department of the Seine. We 
slowly commemorate the intellectual characters of our 
own country, and our men of genius are still defrauded 
of the debt we are daily incurring of their posthumous 

* Since this was first printed, the Diary of Evelyn has appeared ; 
and although it could not add to his general character, yet I was not 
too sanguine in my anticipations of the diary of so perfect a literary 
character, who has shown how his studies were intermingled with the 
business of life. 



IMMORTALITY OF THOUGHT. 385 

fame. Let monuments be raised, and let medals be 
struck ! They are sparks of glory which might be 
scattered through the next age ! 

There is a singleness and unity in the pursuits of 
genius which is carried on through all ages, and will for 
ever connect the nations of the earth. The immor- 
tality of Thought exists for Man ! The veracity 
of Herodotus, after more than two thousand years, is 
now receiving a fresh confirmation. The single and 
precious idea of genius, however obscure, is eventually 
disclosed ; for original discoveries have often been the 
developments of former knowledge. The system of 
tL t rculation of the blood appears to have been ob- 
scurely conjectured by Servetus, who wanted expe- 
rimental facts to support his hypothesis ; Vesalius 
aad an imperfect perception of the right motion of the 
blood : CvEsalpinus admits a circulation without com- 
prehending its consequences; at length our Harvey, 
by patient meditation and penetrating sagacity, removed 
the errors of his predecessors, and demonstrated the 
true system. Thus, too, Hartley expanded the hint 
of " the association of ideas" from Locke, and raised a 
system on what Locke had only used for an incidental 
illustration. The beautiful theory of vision by Berke- 
ley, was taken up by him just where Locke had 
dropped it ; and as Professor Dugald Stewart describes, 
by following out his principles to their remoter conse- 
quences, Berkeley brought out a doctrine which was 
as true as it seemed novel. Lydgate's "fall of Princes," 
says Mr. Campbell, " probably suggested to Lord Sack- 
ville the idea of his ' Mirror for Magistrates.' " The 
Mirror for Magistrates again gave hints to Spenser in 



386 THE FAMILY OF GENIUS ILLUSTRATED 

allegory, and may also " have possibly suggested to 
Shakspeare the idea of his historical plays." When 
indeed we find that that great original, Hogarth, 
adopted the idea of his u Idle and Industrious Appren- 
tice," from the old comedy of " Eastward Hoe," we 
easily conceive that some of the most original inventions 
of genius, whether the more profound or the more 
agreeable, may thus be tracked in the snow of time. 

In the history of genius therefore there is no chrono- 
logy, for to its votaries every thing it has done is 
present — the earliest attempt stands connected with 
the most recent. This continuity of ideas characterises 
the human mind, and seems to yield an anticipation of 
its immortal nature. 

There is a consanguinity in the characters of men of 
genius, and a genealogy may be traced among their 
races. Men of genius in their different classes, living 
at distinct periods, or in remote countries, seem to 
reappear under another name ; and in this manner there 
exists in the literary character an eternal transmigration. 
In the great march of the human intellect the same 
individual spirit seems still occupying the same place, 
and is still carrying on, with the same powers, his great 
work through a line of centuries. It was on this 
principle that one great poet has recently hailed his 
brother as " The Ariosto of the North," and Ariosto 
as " The Scott of the South." And can we deny the 
real existence of the genealogy of genius? Coperni- 
cus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton ! this is a single line 
of descent ! 

Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke, Descartes and 
Newton, approximate more than we imagine. The 






BY THEIR GENEALOGY. 387 

same chain of intellect which Aristotle holds, through 
the intervals of time, is held by them ; and links will 
only be added by their successors. The naturalists, 
Pliny, Gesner, Aldrovandus, and Buffon, derive 
differences in their characters, from the spirit of the 
times ; but each only made an accession to the family 
estate, while he was the legitimate representative of the 
family of the naturalists. Aristophanes, Moliere, and 
Foote, are brothers of the family of national wits : the 
wit of Aristophanes was a part of the common property, 
and Moliere and Foote were Aristophanic. Plutarch, 
La Mothe le Yayer, and Bayle, alike busied in 
amassing the materials of human thought and human 
action, with the same vigorous and vagrant curiosity, 
must have had the same habits of life. If Plutarch 
were credulous, La Mothe le Yayer sceptical, and 
Bayle philosophical, all that can be said is, that though 
the heirs of the family may differ in their dispositions, 
no one will arraign the integrity of the lineal descent. 
Varro did for the Romans what Pausanias had done 
for the Greeks, and Montfaucon for the French, and 
Camden for ourselves. 

My learned and reflecting friend, whose original re- 
searches have enriched our national history, has this 
observation on the character of Wickliffe: — " To 
complete our idea of the importance of Wickliffe, it is 
only necessary to add, that as his writings made John 
Huss the reformer of Bohemia, so the writings of John 
Huss led Martin Luther to be the reformer of Germany; 
so extensive and so incalculable are the consequences 
which sometimes follow from human actions."* Our 
* Turner's History of England, vol. ii. p. 432. 



388 CONCLUSION. 

historian has accompanied this by giving the very feelings 
of Luther in early life on his first perusal of the works 
of John Huss : we see the spark of creation caught at 
the moment : a striking influence of the generation of 
character ! Thus a father-spirit has many sons ; and 
several of the great revolutions in the history of man 
have been carried on by that secret creation of minds 
visibly operating on human affairs. In the history of 
the human mind, he takes an imperfect view, who is 
confined to contemporary knowledge, as well as he who 
stops short with the Ancients. Those who do not carry 
researches through the genealogical lines of genius, 
mutilate their minds. 

Such, then," is the influence of Authors ! — those 
"great lights of the world," by whom the torch of 
genius has been successively seized and perpetually 
transferred from hand to hand, in the fleeting scene. 
Descartes delivers it to Newton, Bacon to Locke ; 
and the continuity of human affairs, through the rapid 
generations of man, is maintained from age to age ! 



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